But Sadie had gone.
Later, Quinn lay awake as long as he could, but finally succumbed to sleep. In the night he woke gasping for breath, the remnants of unpleasant dreams still cobwebbed about his hair and neck. His first thought was that she had stabbed him. He unbuttoned his tunic and expected to feel the dull stick of blood on his fingers. It was dark. Hot and dark. Dark and hot. A churning pain in his guts. He curled up as tight as he could on the wooden floor, made a fraying ball of himself, the way he’d seen injured men do. He heard the dull pad pad pad of the girl’s bare feet. The mad girl, whatever was her name. Sadie. Shit. Coming for him. Imagine surviving all he had survived to be stabbed in the stomach by a crazed orphan girl.
He floundered about for something he might use as a weapon but could find nothing. He was hopelessly disoriented. He bumped his head against the iron leg of the stove. He slithered over the boards, aiming for the corner. The revolver. Where was his revolver? Still he fumbled in his pockets. That’s right. The revolver was lost.
Then she was beside him, visible at first as an outline, the dull shine of her face against the greater darkness, saying things he couldn’t hear above the clamour of his breathing. He shuffled backwards and flung out a hand to ward her off, but she was stronger than he would have thought—or he, weaker—and, as his breathing slowed and he gave up struggling, he heard beyond the roar of his partial deafness that she wasn’t saying anything in particular, at least not words, just a soft shhh shhh shhh.
The girl scampered away and returned a minute later. She lit the candle and stirred liquid in a tin mug with one finger. She held the mug to his mouth. “Drink this.”
The mug contained a murky fluid that smelled of nothing in particular, perhaps the slight whiff of a chemist’s.
“Bicarb and water,” she said. “Best thing to take if you’ve been gassed. I heard Tom Smith talking about it. I got a whole box of it for you.”
Quinn sniffed it, then drank. The mixture was mildly bitter, but the pain in his stomach eased. Sadie had a hand cupped against the back of his head to help him drink. Her hands were still redolent of the orange they had eaten earlier, her breath a freshly watered orchard. Weeping now and spluttering, he gulped the concoction. His gratitude was pathetic. He could not recall the last time anyone had cared for him in such a manner. Even the nurses at Harefield were brisk, their English jolliness stretched tight across the wards. And fair enough: men died all the time, were trundled out daily under sheets or sent back to France as soon as they could walk.
Some minutes passed before Sadie shifted herself free of him.
“Thank you,” he said.
She shuffled across the floor and he heard the granular strike of a match as she lit another candle. A halo of light pooled around her and threw her shadow high onto the wall behind. The knife was still in her fist.
“Now you have to do something for me,” she said.
14
Quinn kneeled on the floor, bare-chested, his dirty singlet beside him. Sweat collected in the folds of his stomach. With his left hand he pulled his chest skin taut against the hull of his ribs. Sadie, girlish again, squatted nearby, watching him, chin cupped in her hands. He didn’t know why he had agreed to her request but hoped it might, at least, ease her evident distress. He held the knife in his free hand and motioned with it, two quick strokes above his shining chest. “Here? Like this?”
She nodded.
“Are you sure I need to do this? Can’t you take my word—”
“No.”
“This is rather strange, that’s all.”
“Come on. Do it.”
Bats squeaked in the trees outside. He imagined an ancient man rapidly opening and closing dozens of tiny cabinet doors on rusted hinges, seeking something he had misplaced. Very little was out of the question these days. He pressed the blade to his skin and carved a jagged cross into his chest. Nothing for a second—then black blood.
On the troopship to the Middle East for training, soldiers had carved designs into their skin and filled the wound with a paste made from soot and oil, a scrimshaw tattoo forever on their bodies. They engraved the names of their sweethearts, their mothers, the town they were from or the battalion to which they now belonged. But this, what Sadie demanded of him, this was different—part punishment, part promise.
He gestured for her to pass him the moist cloth she had ready to wipe away the blood, but she shook her head.
“You got to say the words or it doesn’t mean anything.”
Quinn was reminded of Sarah and the way little girls always had elaborate rules for things that were impossible to know in advance. Often, games were only excuses for a new set of behavioural guidelines, and often stalled on the finer points of the correct way to play hide-and-seek or snap. One spring day, Sarah refused to eat or drink until Quinn and a furious William had dressed as sprites so they could act out a poem she had written about a troupe of acrobats who encountered a mysterious tribe. As always, the thought of his sister prompted in him an odd sensation, as if a trough had opened inside him, one so deep it might swallow him altogether.
By now the blood from his two cuts had dribbled down to his stomach. Still on his knees, he straightened to prevent it staining his trousers, but it was too late. The wool at his waist was already darkening. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. “Now pass me that cloth.”
Sadie grinned and crawled over to him. From a shallow tray of water she drew the soaking cloth. This she applied to his skin, tenderly at first, barely touching him, then harder, wiping away the blood that had begun to coagulate in the hair of his chest. The wounds were not painful and felt to Quinn like some sort of release. As he watched Sadie bent to her task, he half expected to see steam sighing from the two raw gills now carved into his flesh.
The following morning, Quinn noticed an odd bundle strung from one of the eaves, the unravelled remnants, or so it first looked, of a bird’s nest. Closer inspection revealed the package to have been constructed from several thin bones, indeed perhaps those of a bird, bound together with black hair and lengths of dried wheat grass. The frail, prehistoric-looking object crackled in his hands. He scanned the porch eaves and located two more, each hanging like the first by a length of cotton from a beam. Sadie was out somewhere. He had not seen her since he woke. He took down the bundles and pondered them in his palm before putting them back.
When she returned later that afternoon, he asked her about them, but she offered no explanation. She stared at him with her sooty eyes. “You didn’t do anything to them, did you?”
“No.”
“Don’t touch them. They’re important.”
“But what are they?”
She put down the apple she had been eating. “Leave them exactly where they are. Don’t even touch them.”
With his vision now attuned to the offerings, he began to spy them everywhere. She must have been fashioning them for years. Here and there in the bushland around the shack, he stumbled across Lilliputian cairns of rocks and stones. Clumps of hair, fingernail clippings and torn shards of photographs leaked from the gaps between them. He found clusters of bones arranged in patterns on the ground, the cuticles of insects. Once, even a brass candlestick, its stem stuffed with wax and shredded cloth. An old medicine jar crammed with animal teeth and kangaroo paws. Arranged on windowsills and the shack floor were patterns of string and dry grass, mounds of desiccated snail shells. A red marble hung from a tree on a length of twine where it glowed in the afternoon light like a globule of blood.
One day, several hundred yards from the house, he found a wattle tree adorned not only with its brushy yellow flowers but also with what he took to be dozens of children’s fingers. He remembered what his mother had said about Mrs. Fox’s involvement in witchcraft. He approached with trepidation and was relieved to discover the pale cylinders to be rolled pages of the Bible, bound with hair. The ends of each were crimped shut.
He stood there for some time admiring her
handiwork, which must have taken hours to accomplish. The air shrilled with cicadas. He plucked a tube from the tree, picked apart the seam and poured the contents into his palm. It contained ash, seeds and pebbles, an empty silver locket. The page was from the Book of Jeremiah. I will not cause mine anger to fall upon you: for I am merciful, saith the Lord. Mindful of her warnings, he placed it back as carefully as he could. Sweat coursed down his face and dried gritty as salt on his lips.
Sadie stole some civilian clothes for him. A white shirt, dark trousers and a jacket. Each item was worn, faded in places, but in reasonable condition. The clothes were light against his body, insubstantial. He didn’t ask where she got them.
He visited his mother every day. Her health continued to deteriorate and mostly she was unable to carry on any conversation. He read to her, as she had to him and his siblings when they were ill, but it was unclear what she understood or whether his visits were beneficial. Often they sat without speaking, and it was these occasions that Quinn feared the most. Not only was he terrified for his mother’s health, but during these grim silences he was most aware of phantoms pressing against the outer panes of his memory.
At dusk, Quinn and Sadie sat outside to catch the last of the light. It was the best time of day. Birds frolicked through the air and the hot afternoon grew sleepy and docile. Sadie often sat on a stump with her chin cupped in one hand and told him stories: of the blackfellas she had once seen dragging the carcass of a kangaroo through the bush, how they gibbered and menaced her; that Kimberley Porteous talked every night to a photograph of her late husband, Reginald, who was killed by Germans in France; how Billy Davis sometimes met Miss Haylock by the river on summer nights. She knew everything private of the townsfolk, hoarded lives, could see into the very chamber of people’s hearts.
Later, when the moon rose, they went inside, lit candles and devoured whatever food they had. Quinn still slept on the bed he had made of his trench coat while Sadie, he’d since discovered, nestled in a crawlspace she had dug out beneath some broken floorboards, with a blanket and a knife for comfort.
He still feared this mysterious whelp, this Sadie Fox, in ways he was unable to define. In the middle of the night he heard her talking to herself, praying, whispering phrases she had half heard from church services. Pray my soul to keep. Though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death. Lord is a shepherd. Sometimes he lifted the broken board and watched her sleeping among the scraps of clothes and apple cores and chicken bones. He observed the twitch of her brow and the flex of her toe, the Morse code of her dreaming that played along her body.
But she watched him, too. Sometimes he opened his eyes at night to see her, visible at first as two large, milky pearls blinking in the dark. Then, depending on the size of the moon, perhaps the outline of her jaw or the dull shine of her hair, the glint of her knife. The first time this happened they watched each other in silence: Quinn on his side on the floor; she, a dislodged gargoyle by the door with her arms wrapped around her knees. Although he was certain she knew he was awake, they didn’t acknowledge each other then, or the next day.
After several nights of this, she sidled deeper into the room, inch by inch, until she was so close Quinn could smell the tang of her unwashed skin. One morning, he woke to discover her folded into the curl of his body, her sweaty hair tickling his throat, her heartbeat hard and fast against his own. Without discussion, this became the way they slept every night.
The summer days droned on. They settled into a pantomime of domesticity: tidying the shack; gossiping about Flint residents; sharing meals; dozing through the long afternoons, one of her thin arms flung across his chest. Day and night, the opiate tide of heat moved through the wreck of the ramshackle cottage.
The cross Sadie had demanded Quinn carve into his chest started to heal over, but there began to appear all over his body—particularly about his torso and arms—other wounds, a barbed-wire galaxy of dark planets and stars, of tiny moons adrift over his pale skin. Some were deep and painful, others mere nicks. Of making them himself he had no memory. Most mornings he would wake to discover one or two more. Perhaps Sadie did it as he slept. Who knew what she was capable of? If she noticed them when they bathed or slept, she didn’t mention it. He pored over them in the morning, trying to determine which were new. He kept his shirt sleeves rolled down when he visited his mother but was aware at all times of their minute keening.
They swam sometimes in a nearby creek, washed their clothes, and dried them on rocks or flung across branches. Quinn’s beard itched as it grew. At night, when the house and surrounding bush were still, he heard the whiskers growing through his cheeks with a sound like that of countless nails being prised from wood. Inspecting himself in a shard of mirror he was surprised to detect in his bristles spatters of grey, as if the beard were that of an older man grafted over his more youthful face. Absently he stroked this new feature, finding in the action a curious pleasure.
Sometimes Sadie vanished for hours, whereupon he would pace around the ruined house or sit marooned with his back to a crumbling wall and listen, just listen, trying to pick through the bird calls and rustling leaves, straining to hear a sign of her return. On several occasions he attempted to follow her but was never able to keep up, and each time she disappeared he feared she’d left for good. He fretted over the things that might happen and became certain with every passing hour that disaster had befallen her: she had slipped into a mine shaft, been caught by his uncle, been bitten by a snake.
But always, regardless of how stonily he waited, she would appear from nowhere, approaching with no audible footfall and no explanation as to her former whereabouts. He was surprised at the desperation he felt at her absence. Over the years he had inured himself to solitude and often found it preferable to be alone. He had become a man who kept himself aloof, but now this. This strange longing.
Sadie didn’t talk much or, rather, she didn’t reveal much more about herself. If Quinn asked about her parents, she shrugged and made indeterminate noises of regret. If he continued she became sullen, then angry, causing Quinn to feel guilty for pressing her so. He shuddered to imagine all the children of the world left defenceless, abandoned by war or disease to fend for themselves. He pictured a crusading army of them storming over the land with Sarah at their head, seeking retribution from those who had failed them.
He saw her sometimes when he was out collecting wood or returning from visiting his mother. She would be kneeling in the bracken apparently engaged in conversation with an insect or lizard he couldn’t see. Once he saw her standing with her entire body pressed to the trunk of a paperbark tree, in communion with its peeling surface. He watched her from ten feet away until she turned to him as if she had known of his presence all along, blinked, ran a hand through her greasy hair and said, “This tree says it will rain tonight. The ants say the same thing. They know everything, of course. They talk with everyone here. You see how they stop and chat with each other?”
Rain seemed unlikely: overhead the sky was blue and cloudless. That night they ate boiled potatoes and bread smeared with honey. The shack was lit by numerous candles and a gas lamp she had picked up somewhere.
Later, he heard the dark rumble of thunder, followed by the spatter, only a purr at first but increasing in clamour like an applauding audience rising to its feet, of rain. He went outside and onto his outstretched palm fell large, sluggish drops. A surge of comfort and fear overwhelmed him as he sensed Sadie behind him in the shack watching him. Rain, just as she’d said. Rain.
15
The air in his mother’s room was warm, narcotic. As usual, she was asleep. Her profile was queenly, her neck marmoreal. The curtains were drawn against the summer sun.
He thought about how, in France during the war, he was billeted with several other Australian soldiers at a farmhouse in a village that was home to about a hundred families. The village had cobbled streets and houses with thatched roofs, a tatty square of yellow sand in which old men ga
thered to smoke in the afternoon. There was also a church rumoured to contain, among other things, the immaculately preserved body of a shepherdess beheaded hundreds of years earlier for spurning the advances of a scoundrel, but who had carried her severed head several miles before dropping dead. The village might have been just as it was hundreds of years ago were it not for the persistent thump of artillery from the Front twenty miles away.
An elderly couple managed the farm. Their eleven-year-old grandson Philippe lived with them: Philippe’s father was away fighting, and his mother was in Paris for reasons that were never clear. The boy would linger in the doorway as the soldiers played cards at night. A fellow called Bill Spark named him The Watcher. “Look out, boys,” he would say with a wink. “The Watcher’s ’ere. Better mind your langwidge now.”
It was late winter, 1918. The air swirled with news and rumours: the Germans had captured one hundred thousand men on the Eastern Front; the British were advancing on the Jerusalem–Nablus Road; hundreds were lost when a cruiser was sunk off the Irish coast; Billy Hughes had typhoid. Quinn’s own battalion was down from one thousand men to around three hundred. He had expected some atonement from his war experience, but it had offered nothing of the sort. Men died and were replaced by others. They huddled underground in trenches, in hollows, in ruins, many of them so muddied and grey about the gills they might have been fashioned from the earth itself. By this stage they didn’t fear death so much as they feared living this way forever. War, he had discovered, blighted every sense a man possessed: if he closed his eyes to the sight of ruined trees and bloodied men, he still heard guns and screaming; if he covered his ears he still felt the jolting earth; the smell of gas lined his nostrils; everything he touched was wet or bloody. Even when asleep, he dreamed of flickering explosions of light, of torn clothing, of grunting laughter. And on and on it went.
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