When Quinn returned to his campsite beneath the pines, he felt sure someone had rummaged through his bag. The black, tubular entrails of his gas mask spilled from its haversack and his trench coat, which he had hung securely from a branch, was slumped in the dirt. Nothing was taken, however. His demob papers, his pay book, his few clothes were all there. A chill clambered through him. He stood still, expecting to hear or otherwise detect something in the breeze, a whisper or shift that might alert him to an unwelcome presence. He drew his revolver and patrolled the immediate vicinity, pausing here and there to examine a broken twig or possible footprint. But he found nothing and returned to his camp to make a fire.
During the war he had heard of soldiers being driven mad by the certainty they had been selected—through what process no one could say—by an enemy sniper, and these crazed men would expend valuable energy dodging and weaving through the trenches and across duckboards in the hope of escaping the bullet they were convinced was intended for them. It was a sensation Quinn now understood. Every so often he swivelled in the expectation of spying the looming shadow of the idiot Edward Fitch or, worse, his own uncle and father, come to hang him. It was well known that the bush in these parts sustained creatures undiscovered by natural science, and as a boy he had seen unfamiliar smears and paw prints in the mud by the river, perhaps those of water babies, or frog people, or hairy giants; those beasts created far from the sight of God. The blackfellas said there lived nearby a being who possessed the shape of a man but was red all over, with suckers at the ends of his fingers and toes to drain the blood from his victims.
Quinn strained his hearing. He jammed a finger into his ears. Nothing. Still nothing.
The doctors had told him the loss of hearing was a result of the booming sixty-pounders and there was little they could do for him. They said it would be temporary, but sometimes it felt as if the mud from those damn French battlefields would clog his ears forever. At times he heard the roar of a bushfire, at others a high-pitched keening. Over the past few months he had become accustomed to the noise, but the relative silence of the Australian countryside only made him more conscious of it, as if the war were still going on inside his skull. Indeed, his limited hearing now made him acutely aware of the sounds of his own body working away beneath the skin—of the creak of neck joints when he turned his head, his plodding heart, the gurgle and sing of his blood. Still, he was lucky. He had been told of one fellow who suffered a similar complaint, but for whom the sound in his ears was of a cat purring at his shoulder all day. There were, however, compensations for his diminished hearing; he felt sure his eyesight had improved in order to balance his damaged senses and believed he could now see things others could not. In London, for example, he had been able to spot acquaintances in milling crowds that remained unseen to those with him.
He sat on a log and stared into his fire. A spark corkscrewed skywards, like an angel being dragged back to heaven. It was odd to be alone. During the war he grew used to the press of many bodies, to the whiff of other men and their whispering hearts of fear. They were a brotherhood of terror huddled in the trenches with their foreheads pressed to earthen walls, from which they would pick scabs of dirt while awaiting bombardment or rifle crack. He didn’t fear death. He imagined there were few miseries he hadn’t experienced, and while those around him prayed for their lives, his prayers were far more simple—for release from all this.
Again he circled the immediate area surrounding his camp but could find nothing further and, when he was sure there was no man or creature observing him, he collapsed to the ground and fell into a fitful sleep.
6
The next day Quinn again made his way to his father’s property. As before, he waited behind the low shrubs until certain there was no one else around, then trotted across the yard and crept into the house.
His attention was drawn to the short, horizontal pencil marks on the doorjamb between the kitchen and hallway. They recorded the heights of all three children. Each birthday, his father would brandish a ruler and pencil with ceremony (No standing on toes! No slouching!) to measure how much each of them had grown in the past year. Nathaniel, whose tongue always protruded from his lips when he concentrated, saying, Hmmm, not so good this year. Must eat more carrots. Mary laughing and gathering the other two squealing children to her, patting their hair in place with a wetted palm.
His father’s crooked scrawl was now almost illegible. Quinn bent down and ran his fingertips across the words. Within the simple William 1900 12yrs or Sarah 1905 8yrs there nestled entire sagas of bruised knees and the time William nearly cut off his hand while chopping wood. How Sarah was always short for her age on account of having to spend a winter in bed with fever. She also missed a year when she decided she was too old for that sort of thing. Of William, who spent a night beside Sutton Creek to wait for the bunyip Sarah said she had spied there one day, describing the awful creature in such detail that Quinn—who knew the tale to be fabricated—found himself avoiding the area for some weeks. And his sister, poor Sarah, whose measurement for her twelfth birthday was the final entry for any of them.
When Quinn entered his mother’s room, she was asleep but woke with a start after several minutes. Her bony hand wandered out to him. Her tongue clacked in her dry mouth.
“Quinn?”
“Yes.”
“Is that really you? Here in this room? I thought I dreamed you before—I mean I have dreamed of you. Many times. What are you doing here?” Her disbelief was heartbreaking. “I told people all sorts of things. Stories. We thought you were dead. I assumed you were dead. Everything so sudden and fast. I have mourned you, Quinn. For you and your sister both.” She fumbled at a sheaf of papers by her side until she located what she sought, and pressed on him a crumpled piece of paper.
“What’s this?”
“It’s the telegram they sent. From the Army.”
Quinn handled the telegram with distaste. Her eagerness to show him news of his own death was disconcerting. He hesitated before opening it. The words were faded. He skimmed and made out Regret, then Sergeant Walker. Died painlessly. Pozières. Gallant. His country. He refolded the telegram and handed it back to her.
Again she stared at him until, with a vague wave, she indicated her own face. “Your injury. You have changed so much. Surely only I would recognise you.”
“You have changed, too.”
She nodded as she drank from a glass of water, handed the glass back to him. “Well, a lot has happened. Besides, I suspect I am dying. The doctor refuses to say a word about it and your father thinks there will be a miracle cure any day now, you know how he is. He pores over journals and talks to anyone he thinks might know something.” She paused to catch her breath. “I have lost almost everyone, you know. All my children. Sarah, of course. You. Your brother moved to Queensland. My parents. Dear Robert comes by sometimes, but he is busy with his job. So many good people died in the war. Your father has gone wild. He took up drink and gets into fights at Sully’s. He will kill you if he finds you. He has told me a hundred times. Robert, too. They will not be swayed. Your father became someone different from the man I married—I mean, he was always of his own mind but he never goes to church since it happened, and I am here lying in bed, dying. They call it a flu, but it is surely something more serious than that. There is talk of other, worse things. Some say it is the plague. Here, in the twentieth century, can you imagine, Quinn?”
The heat of the room was mammalian, oppressive. Quinn stepped over to the curtain and parted it a fraction to peer outside. A slice of daylight keened into the dim room.
“Do you remember how Apollo inflicted a plague on the Greeks for kidnapping Chryseis? Do you remember how I read that to you, Quinn? The Iliad? When you were a boy? Those stories I read to you and … the others?”
She licked her lips. “When my parents died I inherited my father’s library, as you know. He had been a voracious reader, had books sent out from London, journals and th
e like. This is right after I was married, and Robert had left for England. Your father and I had moved to Bathurst, and I was dreadfully lonely. And I recall picking a book at random from one of the crates and starting to read, and before I knew it the afternoon had darkened and my weeping had been kept at bay for several hours.”
Mary took another sip of water. “A Thousand and One Nights,” she said with relish. “Even now I think of the City of Brass, the dead queen with quicksilver eyes. Magic carpets. I read them to you. An old book it was, with purple and gold pictures. My goodness. Full of genies and bearded men and giant eagles, a magnetic mountain that sucked the nails from the hull of a ship. Those stories were better than dreams. They transported me, Quinn. Not even the Bible had managed that. Your father was quite alarmed, not helped by the foolish legend going around that anyone who finished all the stories would die. He thought it unnatural for a woman to read so much. I credit those crates of books for—well, not quite saving my life, of course, but something close to it. A good story is like medicine, in my opinion.”
His mother had become more animated, but now she closed her eyes, as if the effort of speech had exhausted her. Quinn traced the lumpy scar at his mouth. The bed squeaked under him when he shifted his weight.
“And do you remember all those other stories I told you?” she asked.
Of course he remembered. His mother’s storytelling abilities were renowned. On winter nights all five of them would assemble in front of the fire—Nathaniel sucking on his pipe, William huddled with arms folded about his knees, Sarah resting against Quinn’s shoulder—as their mother’s voice, pitching and growling, altering with each character, swirled around the darkness. She told them of Tom the chimney sweep and his encounter with the water babies, of Peter Rabbit, of Gulliver’s travels to the land of the savage and frightening Yahoos. She didn’t even need a book. If called upon to manufacture something from thin air, she could stitch together a tale from all she had heard over the years, even adding a few creations of her own: a race of tiny folk who lived in the garden on old tea leaves, an insect with the face of a dog. She could make even the moral verses from the Boy’s Own Paper exciting.
“How I have missed my children,” she continued. “A cavern inside me. And I have ventured there often searching for you, but it is always empty. I want to ask you more but I am unsure if I even want to know. I have resisted hearing too much about that day. It is enough that it happened. More than enough. I would often sit in your old room, the room you all shared, and an entire day would pass. Your brother was unable to sleep in there after what happened and left soon afterwards, in any case. He slept in the hallway or on the veranda until he went north. You all left, but the room is the same.
“You remember Sarah’s little cigar box of things she collected? Her lucky things? She had a feather in there and I went through a period when I would clutch it—you will think me mad on this—in my right hand and hold it to my forehead and pray. Later I developed a peculiar certainty that by doing so and saying a part of some Byron poem she might return to me, or perhaps I to her. That you all would, because it was only after that day that so much went wrong. Her … her death was at the heart of everything.”
Mary paused again. “I did the same sort of thing with your cigarette cards, William’s soldiers. Incantations they were, I suppose. Blasphemous, probably. Your father hates that I go in there. Says I’m being maudlin. Perhaps he is right but now he leaves me to my own devices. He almost never spoke of her death. Said he didn’t want to infect people with our grief. Infect them, what a word! It is one thing to die but another thing entirely to do so in such a manner. Murder. No one knew what to say to me. Even the minister. And now the war, the plague. No one knows what to say to anyone anymore …” Her voice trailed away.
Soon she fell asleep. He watched her for a long time. She gasped for breath, twitched, whispered words he was unable to decipher. As he cooled her face and neck with a damp cloth, an idea took hold in him until it had assumed the status of a conviction. To care for his mother, to allow her some peace, at least, to ensure she knew no child of hers was guilty of murder: perhaps this was why he had been summoned? Somewhat heartened, he kissed her burning cheek, and returned to his campsite.
7
That night, Quinn lay back, snugged into the curve his shoulders had made in the pine needles and stared up at the darkness. The moon hove into view. The forest spoke in its secret tongue, and if he turned his head and pressed his ear to the ground he fancied he might hear the millions of dead rustling in their mass, unmarked graves on the far side of the world. Sarah had always claimed to understand the language of animals and trees, the growls of possums and wallabies. But what of the dead?
The previous year, while on leave in London, he had visited a celebrated spiritualist with his friend Fletcher Wakefield, whose fiancée in Adelaide had died of tuberculosis. Fletcher grinned a lot, one of those fellows invariably described as irrepressible. In their dormitory at Abbey Wood, he talked to Quinn about his late sweetheart and of the wedding they had planned. Although this conversation took many diversions, it always ended with Fletcher regretting how he had missed his chance to tell Doris how much he loved her and how she was without a doubt—without any doubt in the world—the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Far too good for me, would generally be the self-mocking postscript. Far too good.
Quinn was reluctant to attend, but Fletcher, who had gone to numerous séances before, assured him the spirits only spoke to those with an open heart and who asked the medium a specific question. The spirits, by their nature, were only concerned with those interested in them. This was perhaps some consolation.
London was teeming with such places at the time and there was no shortage of people wishing to communicate with dear ones who had crossed over. There were women who conjured spirits that rapped on the undersides of tables, men who photographed ghostly faces hovering about one’s shoulders in velvet-dark rooms, a medium who spoke in the voice of a long-dead Indian chief. Quinn had even heard of a young lady who, from her ears, could draw forth the gelatinous substance of which ghosts were made. To Quinn it seemed the world was suddenly so full of grieving people that to wander London’s streets was to feel the press not only of those present and alive, but also to be aware of their collective longing for loved ones killed in the Great War.
Along with eight others, Quinn and Fletcher filed into the wood-panelled parlour of the Marylebone house of a Mrs. Alice Cranshaw whose triplet daughters, it was said, possessed the ability to hear the voices of those who had departed this world, and to relay their messages to those still living.
Mrs. Cranshaw’s parlour was warm and dark. The lady herself was stout and middle-aged and smoked a cigarette in a holder while casting an imperious gaze over the throng. Fletcher greeted an acquaintance, leaving Quinn unaccompanied. He felt conspicuous in his uniform and endeavoured to remain unnoticed, but Mrs. Cranshaw beckoned to him and drew him so close he could feel her breath’s wet bluster on his cheek.
“And who are you here for, my dear?”
“Pardon?”
The woman made an odd movement with her mouth, as if chewing her own tongue, before sliding the glistening holder between her lips. Her hair was like so much wire arranged atop her head. Quinn cast about for Fletcher, but he was still engaged in conversation. Mrs. Cranshaw gripped his arm. There were flecks of spittle on the corners of her mouth. “Don’t worry, boy. I won’t eat you,” she said, although she nibbled on her cigarette holder, which he now saw was made of jade, as if preparing to do just that.
He longed to withdraw his arm but felt it would be rude to do so. She terrified him, a fact of which she was undoubtedly aware and in which she probably delighted.
“Nobody ma’am,” he said at last, and indicated Fletcher. “I’m here with my friend. He wishes to, er, speak with his late fiancée.”
Mrs. Cranshaw frowned. “Oh, but I am sure there is someone. We have all lost someone close in
these dark times. A friend? A brother who might have crossed over? Someone in the war?”
Quinn glanced again at Fletcher.
“Are you afraid of death?” Mrs. Cranshaw asked with a hint of mockery.
Quinn thought about this. “No.”
“You don’t believe what we do here though, do you?”
“That’s not for me to say.”
“Very diplomatic, but you can tell me. I don’t mind. You don’t believe in the spirit world?”
“I don’t think so, ma’am.”
“But you look afraid. Are you afraid, boy?”
“I have no wish to hear what the dead might have to say. Besides, why would they come back here?”
Mrs. Cranshaw sighed. “The spirits are sometimes—how to put this?—unquiet. Restless. Death is not always the end of things for everyone. There is often unfinished business, especially for those killed suddenly and violently—like in war. Sometimes the dead are trapped in an awful halfway world until they can say something to those left behind. Indeed, the living are sometimes themselves trapped, until they hear what the dead might have to tell them. There are some things that cannot be left unsaid. But if you don’t believe in it all, then there is no need to be afraid, is there?”
Quinn realised he despised this woman and, worse, suspected she was a charlatan preying on vulnerable families. It was rumoured she kept the girls—who were probably not her daughters at all—against their will. Everyone knew the Bible prohibited talking with the dead. He attempted to withdraw his arm, a movement that only prompted the woman to clench him tighter.
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