“No. He’s dead as well.”
Sadie slumped back again. “Thank God. Did you kill him, too?”
Quinn made a helpless gesture. He leaned down and put a hand on her shoulder, thinking to comfort her, but she shrugged him away with a grunt of annoyance. She retrieved her filthy cardigan from the floor before tucking her legs up beneath her, primly, as if awaiting inspection. She seemed to have forgotten his presence, almost like one of those shell-shocked people he had seen during the war.
Quinn sat beside her. In silence they stared at a shard of light that crept over the cold stones with the passage of the morning sun, illuminating as it did so the various marks and words scratched into the wall. He was surprised no one had arrived to investigate the revolver shot, but perhaps it had gone unheard. He stared up through the tiny window set high into the wall, out of reach of even the tallest man. The sky was blue, unchanging. He knew it was possible to feel this bad and still not die because he had felt this way before. Small, hard tears of despair rolled down his cheek, one by one. He wondered if his heart might fail for no reason better than pure grief, the way his voice-box did all those years ago.
“I kept hearing angels,” Sadie said after a long time, and tapped her ear, as if she might dislodge the magical creatures lounging there. “All morning I heard angels singing and I thought they were coming for me.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I thought I would die. I thought I was going to die from it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was too late. I didn’t know where he had taken you. I’m so sorry.”
She sighed and turned to him. Her eyes were blurry with tears. “It’s not your fault.” She dusted dirt from her knee. “At least he didn’t kill me,” she said without conviction. “At least I didn’t die.”
Quinn stared down at the revolver in his lap. He supposed this was something. He thought of the Military Medal tumbling drowsily across the ocean floor, wedging here and there in coral, accumulating grime about the engraved image of King George.
She sighed again. “What do we do now?”
“I’m not sure. We should get away from here, though.”
The patch of sunlight had meandered across the floor and glowed on the dull bluestones at their feet. Sadie waggled her grubby toes in its warmth. “Quinn? I’ve been thinking. I don’t think my brother is coming home. I think he would be here by now.”
Quinn coughed. “There are stories, you know, about soldiers coming back to visit people. I heard about that a lot of times in France. In hospital I met a fellow who had been in a battle when the men around him lying in … lying dead in the trench for days got up and began fighting. Dozens of them. The battalion had been outnumbered but they managed to fight off hundreds of Germans. And this man had seen it with his own eyes. He was there. Incredible things happen in war, you know. It’s not a normal time, everything is different.”
Although she had cocked her head to listen to his little story, Sadie didn’t respond. A spider scuttled across the floor and darted into the shadows. She cleared her throat. “But the war is over now, isn’t it? It ended ages ago.”
Quinn fingered the revolver. “Well, yes.”
“How long ago did it finish?”
He calculated. “November last year. A few months ago.”
She pondered this. “But we won, didn’t we?”
“Yes.”
Again she faced him, and he noted how her smile had been made crooked, as if one of the hinges of her mouth were now broken. “But you’re like a brother, aren’t you?”
The dark coal of Quinn’s heart glowed hot and hard. He choked back a sob. He nodded.
“Perhaps we should go to Kensington Gardens? In England. Remember we talked about that once before?”
He shrugged. It was as good an idea as any. At least there it would be green and fresh. There would be water and mist. He could probably get some kind of work quite easily in London; after all, able-bodied men were in short supply. He and Sadie would find somewhere to live. Perhaps he could build them a house? From outside came the sound of the grey’s iron shoes clopping on the flagstones. He heard the wavering, watery drift of a choir—the singing of angels.
“That’s it,” Sadie went on, excited now. “The Gardens are full of trees. There are tricky fairies dressed in flowers. They are everywhere, even though you can’t see them. They live under tree roots. We could live on that island in the lake. There are birds that turn into real boys and girls. Swans, a raven called Solomon, they have parties at night where all the fairies come and dance and there is a queen fairy and she grants wishes. It will be marvellous.”
It sounded an extravagant plan, but Quinn was reluctant to dampen the girl’s sudden enthusiasm after all that had happened. Besides, he was quite taken by the idea himself. “Yes. Why not, eh?”
“How would we get there?”
“We would have to go on a boat.”
“Over the sea?”
“Of course.”
“How long would it take?”
“Well, we would have to go to Sydney first. It might take a few weeks.”
“Goodness, that’s a long time, but it might be worth it. I have nearly four pounds I took from people. Mr. Harman keeps money in a sock. I know it’s wrong but …”
“It doesn’t matter,” Quinn said and fingered the barrel of the revolver. “God is not watching us. I think perhaps we are on our own now. Nothing matters.”
She grunted in assent, stood and patted down her dress. “Yes. He finished with us a long time ago, I think. He has forsaken us.”
Quinn was exhausted. Beneath his feet he detected the grinding of the earth as it revolved in space, a lone machine tracing its eternal orbit. He squatted a minute longer on the filthy mattress. Then he stood, and they both stepped over Dalton and shuffled from the station into the quivering sunlight. He untethered the grey and led it and Sadie south along Gully Road, past Smith’s orchard. Strangely, he felt no urgency, and the girl was content to amble beside him. It was an ordinary Sunday morning in the dying days of summer. Most people were in church or going about their business at the upper end of town. A breeze stirred the trees. There was no one about; indeed, if not for the sound of hymns that once again floated over the treetops as they crossed into the bushland beyond, he might have presumed the town abandoned.
EPILOGUE
Mary Walker did not live long enough to hear what had happened to her beloved brother, Robert. The weather of her dreams had become dark and turbulent in her final days. One afternoon in March 1919, several hours after Robert was found dead from a single bullet wound to the chest, Nathaniel leaned in at her window, as usual, but did not speak. He knew, at once, that she had passed away and did not wish to confirm it any quicker than necessary by asking a question that would go forever unanswered.
In her last weeks, Mary was tormented and, it must be said, comforted by visions of her lost children, Quinn and Sarah, who she claimed gathered around her bed to bathe her burning forehead and sprinkle gifts of lavender. She said all was forgiven. She said everyone was fine. As soon as the death certificate was signed, she was taken out and buried immediately, in accordance with the regulations of those terrible months.
Afterwards, Nathaniel Walker stalked the dusty yard alone for days, staring into the distance, smoking his pipe, muttering prayers and curses to himself. Plates of food and bunches of flowers from neighbours piled up around him until the sagging veranda resembled the scene of a melancholy feast.
Several months later, he sold the property and moved to Queensland to be with William and his wife Jane. He became withdrawn and lost interest in the world and its possibilities. His hair turned silver. In 1924 he fell from a horse, was rendered insensible, and died two weeks later, never having regained consciousness.
Of the girl, Sadie Fox, nothing definite was heard again. There were rumours she had been seen in Newcastle; that she was travelling with her brother, who had returned from the war much changed; that
she wore a necklace beaded with snail shells, gave birth to a rabbit, stowed away on a cargo ship bound for Ireland; that she perished in the epidemic.
Robert Dalton’s brutal death shocked the tiny town. There was nothing stolen except for his service revolver and horse, and no evidence as to whom the killer might be, aside from a pair of bloody footprints that wandered out of the station, along Gully Road and faded away. Young George Carver was despatched that afternoon to tracker Jim Gracie’s place, but the poor boy stumbled on a scene that disturbed his dreams for years to come. Gracie’s starving dogs—seizing their chance to take revenge on the man who had for many years treated them so poorly—were leaping high into the air and fastening their great jaws around the tracker’s bare feet. The Carver boy fled and told his tale, but by the time another man arrived at Gracie’s place the dogs had vanished, leaving the tracker hanging like a man in a gibbet, his feet resembling a pair of butchered chops.
The two murders were assumed to have been committed by the vagrant Fletcher Wakefield, whom Kimberley Porteous recounted talking with that day in the graveyard, although a search of records soon revealed that Wakefield had perished in the last days of the war. It was yet another mystery, deepened by Edward Fitch’s yarn about his encounter with the ghost of Quinn Walker up in the hills, whereupon the sharp gaze of accusation again fell on the man known for so long in Flint as the Murderer. Of course, they said. Of course.
By this time the epidemic had secured its grip on the nation. Hospitals were filled to the brim with coughing patients. Schools closed. Many died each and every day. Mary Walker was only one of a dozen in Flint to pass away as a direct result of influenza. By the end of 1919, when the epidemic had run its course, thousands lay dead in its wake.
With those connected to the Walker family dead or gone from the district, the stories associated with them grew, like untrimmed bougainvillea, in strange and untended directions. So too did Edward Fitch’s account of his time with the Murderer, wherein Quinn—hunchbacked, his face a sunken pudding, odd as a prophet or grizzled saint, now bearing a sack of bones—uttered cryptic slogans that clarified his past and foretold the future. Fitch was known to be unreliable, but the suspicion surrounding his meeting with the damaged man in the hills only served in the eyes of some to give his tale the shimmer of truth.
In the years that followed, a miner or rabbiter would sometimes spy a lone man lurching among the abandoned mines, whereupon the town biddies and those gossips at the bar of The Mail Hotel would be atwitter with renewed speculation as to what really happened in 1909 and again in 1919. Quinn’s dark, rumoured presence became a warning to children not to stray too far of an evening, and there developed around the schoolyard a skipping rhyme that waxed and waned in popularity:
Quinn Walker had a sister, a sister, a sister
One night he kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her
She tried to run away, run away, run away
But he said: You have to stay! Stay! Stay!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Bereft received nourishment from many quarters. For both inspiration and information, I am indebted to: Phantasmagoria by Marina Warner; The Great War by Les Carlyon; Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning by Jay Winter; and Faces of the Living Dead by Martyn Jolly. In addition, I would like to thank Lyn Tranter, Kirsten Tranter, Ian See, and Roslyn Oades for their invaluable encouragement and advice over countless drafts. But, most of all, thanks to my editor Aviva Tuffield, who worked tirelessly (or so it seemed), and without whom this novel would have been twice as long and half as good.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Womersley’s debut novel, The Low Road, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Book in 2008. His fiction and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Granta New Writing 14, Best Australian Stories 2006, Best Australian Stories 2010, The Monthly, and The Age. In 2007 one of his short stories won the Josephine Ulrick Literature Prize. Visit him at www.chriswomersley.com.
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