Quinn did as she told him. Like a trespasser, he stood behind the closed door of the room he had shared with Sarah and William. His heart pounded and he strained to hear. Woolly voices, his father’s and that of Doctor Fraser. There came a knock on the front door. The doctor calling out, his footfalls along the passageway, his mother greeting him. Quinn pressed his ear to the wooden door but could only make out mumbles, a forced cough, the jingling of glass bottles being placed on the dresser. Soon, Doctor Fraser went back outside and chatted with Nathaniel for a moment before leaving.
Quinn relaxed enough to consider his surrounds. His mother was right; the room was unchanged. It was as if he had been transplanted into a memory. There was the same chipped dresser, a shelf with several tattered children’s books and Sarah’s Lucy Doll. Everything was furred with dust, which floated through the light in curlicues. Under the bed he saw a sack of tools. On the floor beside her low bed was Sarah’s cigar box in which she stored her treasures. The box exerted a strange magnetism.
Quinn had never resolved himself to Sarah’s spiritual whereabouts now she was gone. Even though he found it impossible to imagine the pastoral version of heaven people talked about, he was even more uncomfortable at the thought of his sister cold and alone in her rotted coffin. He had often found himself narrating out loud the particulars of, say, tying a knot or checking a sail as if for her benefit. Mostly, he imagined her in some way to be alongside him—twirling her hair, trying to balance on a fence, leaning down to whisper a secret in his ear.
He squatted, picked up the cigar box and opened it. It contained a stamp, a rock shaped like a kangaroo’s head, a length of barbed wire, an imitation pearl, three pebbles of gold, the magpie feather his mother had mentioned, and a large red button. The button Quinn recognised immediately as one of three or four that Sarah had insisted their mother sew onto her dresses—including the white dress, in fact, she was wearing on the day she died. He stared at these things in horror, as if they might assemble against him. If he could have fled at that moment, he would have done so.
From the box he took the red button, held it to his lips, then his forehead. “I had a dream which was not all a dream,” he whispered. “The bright sun was extinguish’d and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space.”
He dropped the button into the cigar box and returned the box with its other treasures to where he had found it. He crept to the window that overlooked the veranda, careful to remain invisible to his father, who was sitting on a chair by Mary’s window with his head in his hands. He appeared confounded, and the shock of seeing him like this infused Quinn with a fierce melancholy. His father had shrunk in the intervening years, had become altogether more human in scale.
His father raised his head and spoke into the open window. “The doctor says you are both better and worse today.”
Mary’s response was inaudible.
“Agitated,” Nathaniel went on. “What? … Well, you should do as he says. He is a doctor … Of course he knows what he is doing. Mary? Are you wearing the camphor? Mary? They say it works. Do you at least have it close by?” He paused to listen. “Very well. I won’t go on about it but make sure it is nearby at all times … I know it smells. I expect it cleanses the air. But there is something else I have ordered from Sydney. A new product should arrive any day now. Hearn’s Bronchitis Cure it’s called, and they assure me that it will help with …”
Quinn could see his father’s face was smeared with soot and his arms were ripe with muscle. A moustache darkened his upper lip. His elbows were slack on his knees, fingers knotted in an attitude of exhaustion or prayer. He raised himself every so often to adjust his position or speak more clearly into his wife’s open window. In his father’s slumping shoulders, in the expressions that flitted across his weathered features, Quinn saw something of their family’s terrible story, the way wind was visible when it ruffled a field of wheat.
His parents ceased talking. His father fidgeted and glanced about. Quinn’s legs grew stiff from staying still for so long. After about fifteen minutes, Nathaniel stood to leave. “Did you see the food the Auxiliary ladies left for you? … Will it be enough? … Are you sure? … And you are eating it, I trust? You need your strength. I should go now. Oh, I nearly forgot. Your brother said he would call by today. Said he’s been busy. Some orphan girl up in the hills he wants to find.” He slapped his hat against his dusty thigh and laughed. “He told me he saw her a few days ago but that—listen to this, Mary—he said that she turned into a snake. Probably dreamed up the whole thing, you know what an imagination he has. It might have been rabbiters or something. Lot of people moving about these days. Anyway, he fell and cut his hand so I expect that held him up a bit.”
Mary said something Quinn couldn’t hear.
“Course he’s alright. Your brother is charmed. But I’ll tell him. I’ll make sure he stops by. Don’t worry, Mary. Save your strength.”
Quinn heard his father step off the veranda and he sat up to watch him retreat back up the road on his horse. When he was sure he had left, Quinn slunk from his former room, down the dim hall, and out into the afternoon that was bursting with sunlight.
As promised, Sadie was waiting for him in the shade of the bloodwood tree. He was unaccountably pleased to see her and had to restrain himself from embracing her. Together they tramped back through the afternoon heat to their shack, but only when they were halfway there did Quinn realise she was not carrying anything.
He stopped. “Did you not find any food?”
Sadie paused with her hands on her hips. She shook her head and wound a strand of hair behind an ear. She looked exhausted. “I couldn’t take anything. Too many people about. Tomorrow I’ll go out even earlier. Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing. Come on, let’s go.”
11
That night Quinn lay on the floor of the shack bundled in his trench coat, his thin hands a cushion of twigs beneath his head. The cooling night creaked outside, and the years he had been gone didn’t feel quite so long. He was hungry. He listened out for footsteps, for voices, for those who wished to hang him from a tree. After some time, the night settled and grew quiet. Wherever she was, the girl made no noise.
Spikenard, he thought suddenly. Was that the name by which lavender was known in the Bible, the word his mother had been trying to think of earlier that day? It was unlike her to forget; for a time he had been certain his mother knew everything there was to know: the names of King Henry’s wives, of all the planets, the dates of the French Revolution. She herself was a curio in these parts where, by and large, people understood little of the outside world and cared even less about its goings-on. When asked how she knew the Latin for Men learn as they teach or that the first governor-general was a chap called Hope, she would smile, tap her head and say she had slept with the encyclopaedia under her pillow as a girl and the information had seeped, entry by entry, into her brain.
Of course this was just another fanciful story. In fact, she’d worked her way through her father’s substantial library after her wealthy parents perished on a boat to Hong Kong when she was nineteen. Quinn remembered her balancing an open dictionary on her palm as she carried the laundry to the line, or fetched flour from the pantry. “Listen to this, children,” she would announce before declaiming a line of poetry or an obscure historical fact. “You’ll like this, William. Do you see this fellow hanging upside-down from a crane, above a road? See that? Houdini, or some such. Good God. Breaks out of padlocks, you know.” She alerted them to the wisdom potentially contained in books. “A story is a wondrous invention,” she would say. “A glimpse into another place altogether. I like sometimes to escape from here.”
She had moved from Sydney to western New South Wales early in her marriage, although she would have preferred to stay in the city, and it was naturally to such environs her imagination drifted. While she had never visited them, she told the children tales of watery London and darkly smoking Cairo. She read to them anything that
came to hand—the Bible, newspapers, stories of the Trojans, incomprehensible poetry stuffed with thee and thou, even advertising pamphlets she picked up in Flint (Life drops are the great household remedy for asthma, bronchitis, colds, dysentery, fevers, spasmodic affection, toothaches etc). Even when baking or sewing she passed on to her children a thousand curious odds and ends, and—although Sarah was by far the most adept at retaining facts and figures—Quinn often found himself, such as now, regurgitating a scrap of information or line of poetry that was almost certainly told to him by his mother on a distant summer’s afternoon. My spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof.
The next thing he knew it was dawn. Glimmers of light flitted through the interior. It reminded him of swimming in a deep and muddy lake. The barrage had stopped some time in the night and for once he couldn’t even hear the distant lolling of artillery. He resolved to take advantage of the silence and lie there as inconspicuous as a rock beneath his coat. Soon enough someone would stumble over him, curse him or otherwise rouse him, and there would be no more sleep until God only knew when. Come on, Walker. Come on, Meek.
He was aware of his breathing, but from within. The moist pull and draw of his ragged lungs. He loosened a splinter from the wooden floor. On the ground in front of him an ant zig-zagged in and out of his focus. It amazed him that such a tiny creature should have its own shadow. He heard the click of his blink. He squeezed the splinter lengthwise between his thumb and forefinger until the skin of first his forefinger and then his thumb was pierced. Twin balloons of blood swelled and burst under their own weight. What a thing. To be alive. To be alive in a time of war was to be charged, as if with electricity, with light, with violence and mercy, all those things of which men were capable.
Then he heard the sounds of birds and realised where he was. The war was over. They had won. Of course. Now anxious, he sat up. He wiped his mouth, which was spongy with drool on the damaged left side. Where was the girl? She’d told him there was a price on his head. Dear God. Of course.
He detected something moving around outside. Footsteps, voices. Sadie, if that were even her real name, had probably told them where he was. Told Dalton. They would kill him. His uncle would string him from a tree. He was a fool to have trusted the child. He was addled, that was the problem. What with the heat and everything, his distress at seeing his mother in such an awful state.
He took up a plank of wood and stood, half crouching, like a large bird preparing to take flight, his coat puddled on the floor beside him. The girl arrived in the doorway, clutching a bulging flour bag to her chest. Quinn raised the length of wood as if to strike.
A look of childish betrayal passed over Sadie’s features. “Don’t hurt me,” she said.
The words were almost inaudible but their meaning was clear to him in the begging of her eyes.
“Who’s with you?” he demanded.
“No one.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“There’s no one.”
“I heard voices.”
The girl mumbled something.
“What?”
“I was singing a song.”
Quinn paused. He angled his head the way the half-blind did to better make out shapes or movement, but heard nothing more. If the girl had brought Dalton or his father, they would have shown themselves by now. He relaxed but kept the piece of wood at the ready.
“Where have you been?”
She hefted her sack by way of answer.
“What’s that?”
“I was out getting food for us. Early morning is the best time.”
“Who gave it to you?”
She laughed humourlessly. “No one gave it to me.”
Quinn wiped his mouth and approached her. She was watching the length of wood, as if preparing to leap clear should he attempt to strike her with it. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her hot body against his own. Then he dragged her squirming and wriggling outside.
She was telling the truth: there was no one there. He released her.
She stood rigid, head down, her hair a lank curtain across her face. The knuckles of the hand holding the bag were white with anger. A floral bruise marked the skin of her inner wrist where Quinn had gripped her. He dropped the wood to the ground.
She flung the bag at him and several items tumbled out. She said something, but it was only when Quinn failed to respond that she looked at him. Her eyes glittered like water at the bottom of a well. “Don’t touch me again or I’ll cut the eyes out of you.”
Ashamed, Quinn stared at the ground to see what had fallen from the bag. A loaf of bread and a tin of jam. Inside, he could see a small bottle of whiskey, a tin of tobacco, some flour, four apples and there, resting against his boot, two oranges. He raised his head to speak to the girl—a sorry or thank you—but she had gone.
12
For twenty minutes, Quinn called out for Sadie and searched the bushland around the shack, but there was no sign of her. She was gone. He chastised himself for his mistrust, packed the food back into the flour bag and left it inside the shack. With some effort, losing his way now and then, he stumbled down to his father’s house alone. He sheltered in the shade of the bloodwood tree until he was sure there was no one around, then went to his mother’s bedside.
His mother’s eyes fluttered open when he entered, then she fell back asleep. Quinn mopped her brow. Her health seemed worse than ever, and he despaired at the possibility that his visits might have been doing more harm than good. There were several bottles of tablets on the dresser by her bed. Quinine, aspirin and Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills— Keep clean inside and out and minimise the risk of influenza.
After several minutes, she woke again and smiled. They talked of trivial things. Through the morning he told her palatable bits and pieces from his years at war: the excitement of joining up; of becoming friends with a soldier from Adelaide called George Kenward; of crossing the English Channel at night, its sickening chop and yaw under low clouds.
“Parts of France are beautiful,” he told her, hardly aware of what he was saying, speaking to fill the vacuum, hoping to rejuvenate her somehow. “The parts away from the war, that is. Such old buildings. They have woods there. Forests, like in the fairy tales you told us when we were children.”
His mother didn’t answer, but he was heartened to see her nod.
“We walked through one at night,” he continued. “It was dark, of course, so I didn’t see very much. There were hundreds of us walking along the road. On the grass and through the trees. Men and horses and mules, as quiet as we could be, talking only now and then to save our energy. The next day we were due to attack a village full of Germans.”
His mother whispered something.
Quinn leaned in. “Pardon, Mother?”
“Were you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“But you went on?”
“There wasn’t much choice. I prayed a lot.”
Mary opened her eyes. “When you were small enough to hold in my arms, your heart used to beat so fast I wondered if, in fact, you didn’t have two hearts in your chest. You were always brave.”
Quinn flinched. “Well,” he said after a silence, “there were a few hundred of us trudging along. It was cold, and we could see our breath when we exhaled. It was like smoke, as if we were already on fire. Mainly you followed the fellow in front, kept walking, didn’t think too much.”
Quinn recalled seeing an owl on the sheared and blackened stump of a tree. The bird gazed at them dispassionately, as if it had stood on that very spot for centuries and watched passing armies. The Gauls, the Romans. Bridles clanked in the darkness. Every now and again someone tripped on a tree root or a piece of wreckage and cursed. Quinn kept his eyes down, concentrated on his footfalls. The air smelled of muddy leaves, of damp wool and of horse sweat.
“After a while the darkness changed colour. We thought we had entered a valley, or a large dip in the landscape because the night became misty. It was t
oo early for morning. We checked our maps. Then we heard several hollow sounds, a sort of pot, followed by another, then another. There was a curious smell—almost recognisable, but not quite—a bit like wet hay. I remember a fellow stumbled to his knees to pray. Then more men did the same. There were lots of men on their knees in the mist, as if the lower parts of their legs had sunk into the mud.”
He wiped his mother’s hot brow. “Gas. We were being shelled with gas. We got on all fours, down low, the way we had been taught, but some blokes panicked and couldn’t get the masks on. They aren’t always easy to put on. Your hands shake and the strap catches on things. And it was dark, of course. Some men breathed the gas in and had to be carried the rest of the way through the night, to the battle.”
The gas had stewed in ditches and wreathed about them as they marched on. They waited for another, louder assault that never came. Some men threw themselves to the ground and had to be coaxed to standing again, so keen were they to enwomb themselves into the earth. Quinn’s own breathing was hot and loud and close in his ears as if, with the mask and its eye shields and tubes and clasps, he had been transformed into a sinister machine. They walked on through the toxic gruel, and those who had been boastful became solemn.
The ground around them was littered with broken equipment, with empty boxes of ammunition, scraps of uniform, books, rubble. He saw a large wall clock. Bicycle wheels and motor-car tyres. The inert bodies of dead men. Crockery, wooden boxes. Papers blew about here and there. A collection of muddy boots, dozens of muddy stretchers. An officer sitting cross-legged on a table watched them as they trudged past and, although his face was obscured by his own mask, his expression was one of grim mockery as he drew a finger across his throat. A pair of chairs, helmets and hats, bully tins, trees stark and broken against the pale sky.
After some time, Quinn became aware of objects crunching beneath his boots. When he crouched to investigate, he discovered they had been walking on small birds that had fallen dead from the trees. Their bodies were plump and stiff. They looked the size of a child’s heart, and he carried one of them in his palm, God only knew why, through the long night until they came to a field at dawn, whereupon he lay down and slept. When he woke hours later, the bird was still cupped in his hand. Its red feathers blew about in the breeze. Its tongue was a pellet of lead. A minister was moving through the coughing and groaning men, among boys suddenly made old. He assured them God was with them in their struggle. Someone wept, another man called out over and over until he was taken elsewhere.
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