by Jem Poster
‘We weren’t well off – I’d left my job as soon as I was sure that the plot was mine – but I was never worried on that score. And Billy – well, the child was a revelation to me. I mean, I hadn’t known I could feel such tenderness, such patient tenderness. He was just a scrap of a thing at first, so small the midwife doubted he’d survive, but when I cradled him for the first time in the crook of my arm and felt the softness of his skin against mine – do you have children, Mr Redbourne?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not married,’ I said. ‘I’ve only recently begun to consider what I might have missed.’
‘Well,’ he said, manoeuvring with a tact and delicacy that took me by surprise, ‘a child’s no guarantee of happiness, nor a wife neither. But speaking for myself, I felt truly blessed. It was a kind of heaven we lived in then – she and I grown so close for all our differences, and the child drawing us closer still. I remember sitting with them one day in the shade of the back wall, looking down over the ripening crops. And I thought, I want nothing more than this. If that wasn’t heaven, Mr Redbourne, I don’t know what is. And heavenly too because, strange as it sounds, I had no thought of it coming to an end, no thought at all.’
He faltered and broke off, evidently caught off guard by his emotions. I should have liked to be able to respond with greater compassion, but I knew too little about the man and his sorrows, and I simply sat back in respectful silence until he resumed.
‘It was like a bolt of thunder from a cloudless sky. I’d been out until dusk, splitting wood for the stove, and I came in to find her in her chair, exactly where you’re sitting now, with her head in her hands. And that was strange because there was no food on the table and she wasn’t one for sitting around when there was work to be done. She raised her head as I came close, but slowly, as though it were weighed down in some way, and I could sense then that something was amiss. I dropped the firewood I was carrying and knelt beside her there, reaching for her hand. And as soon as I touched her skin, I felt the chill of it, a chill from somewhere far down in her body. “What is it?” I asked her, and my heart was banging already as though it knew something my head didn’t. “What is it?”
‘It was a gift she had, to be able to tell me what was in her mind without putting it into words – with a look, it might be, or with something less than a look. She just lowered her eyes, and something in the manner of her doing it frightened me horribly – as if she were saying, Enough or It’s over. “I’ll fetch the doctor,” I said, knowing full well she’d no more want to see one of our doctors than plunge her arm in scalding water, but I was in a panic, d’you see, not knowing what to do, and that was all I could think of. Anyway, she shook her head, very slow and sad, and placed her hand over mine, and we just sat there watching as night came on and the stars brightened in the sky. After some time she told me I should go to bed – insisted on it, with a kind of anger I’d not seen in her before, though I sorely wanted to stay – and I left her there, her arms folded across her breast, her body hunched and twisted a little to one side, leaning out into the darkness.
‘It was just getting light when I woke to see her over by the window, kneeling beside the dilly-bag she’d brought with her when she first moved in with me. When I saw that – saw her packing a spare skirt and blouse, her ebony hairbrush, a velvet ribbon – I thought perhaps I’d misunderstood, and that she’d simply decided to go away for a while. But there was something in the set of her face that told me otherwise, and at last she straightened up and said very quietly, “I’m going home.” “This is your home,” I said, and with that I hauled myself out of bed and stepped towards her. But she backed away as though she didn’t know me, as though I might harm her. “To my people’s lands,” she said, and then, very softly: “It’s time.”
‘Of course I was in a terrible state – you can imagine – but not wanting to let on, not wanting to hinder her. “What shall I tell Billy?” I asked. “I’ve spoken to Billy,” she said. Then she picked up her bag and walked out, quite slowly and carefully, the way people do when they’re in pain, but not hesitating at all. I wanted to hurry after her and catch her in my arms, but I could see that wouldn’t be the right thing. She stepped away down the track, very clear at first in the early sunlight, then half lost against the shine and shadow of the trees. I watched her out of sight, but she didn’t once look back.’
He leaned forward in his chair and stared out through the doorway, his mouth clamped tight and his eyes glistening.
‘And you had no word from her?’
‘Never. Nor expected it. But for weeks after she’d gone I dreamed of her, night in, night out. Always in the same flat landscape – very harsh and dry, scattered with boulders. No shadow, the sun beating down on her. I can’t tell you what it was like to see her out there time after time, very small and lost, with the desert stretching as far as you could see on every side. And she was searching, it seemed to me, always searching, so that I found myself desperate to help, but because I wasn’t allowed to be with her – I can’t say exactly how it was, but that much was plain – there was nothing I could do. There was a time I thought it would go on like that for the rest of my life and maybe beyond, the same vision over and over; but one night, a couple of months after she’d left, I saw her walking along very fast, her head up and all her movements firm and certain. No searching now, and her step so light that her feet barely touched the sand. There was no change in the landscape – none that I could see – but I knew she’d found what she was after. And as I looked, her form thinned and dwindled like a scarf of mist when the sun breaks through, and I woke with a cry of joy on my lips or in my ears – her cry or mine, it wasn’t clear, and it didn’t matter – and hurried to the doorway. It was still dark, but with that faint stirring or softening that you sometimes feel in the few moments before dawn. And as I looked out, I knew there was no call to fret about her any more, and my heart – well, I was weeping like a child, but there was no bitterness in the tears. After that—’
He stopped and raised his head. I had heard it too, an inarticulate shout ending on a rising note, half roar, half yelp. A second or two of blank silence followed, and then a string of sharply delivered expletives. ‘Something’s got Mr Bullen’s dander up,’ said Preece grimly, levering himself to his feet. He limped over to the doorway and peered about, one hand lifted to shade his eyes, then stumped down the steps and out on to the track.
It was Billy, I saw, as I followed Preece out, who had aroused Bullen’s wrath. The boy stood between the two ponies, his head thrown back in sulky defiance, while Bullen berated him in a vicious undertone. ‘Damned fool of a boy’, I heard as we approached. ‘Cack-handed incompetent’. The reaction might have been excessive and the language uncalled-for, but the reason for Bullen’s rage was immediately apparent: the ground was strewn with cartridges, evidently spilled from the open ammunition box that Billy was clutching in his left hand.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Preece.
‘You can see what’s going on. The lad’s been scattering our ammunition about like seed-corn.’
‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ said Billy. ‘The box fell open as I was unloading it. Look.’ He held up the object and shook it, making the hinged lid clack and swing. ‘If it had been properly fastened—’
‘That’s enough, Billy,’ said Preece, leaning forward and laying a hand on the boy’s arm. ‘There’s stew for you in the pot. You go on in and leave us to attend to the baggage.’ He eased the box from the boy’s hand, dropped awkwardly to one knee and began to gather up the spilled ammunition.
‘It’s as well I arrived back when I did,’ said Bullen, turning to me as Billy stalked off. ‘There’s no knowing what damage he might have done.’
Preece looked up over his shoulder. ‘It was an accident, Mr Bullen,’ he said. ‘Just an accident.’ Bullen opened his mouth as though to reply, but seemed to think better of it. He stepped over to the nearer of the two ponies and began to unfasten the luggage-straps.
By the time we had the luggage indoors the sun had sunk behind the trees, and the sky outside was fading to a softer blue. I should have liked to sit and rest, but with Preece wordlessly tidying the room around us and Billy huddled over a book in the corner, pointedly refusing to acknowledge our presence, it seemed sensible to get out of the hut and to take Bullen with me.
A light breeze was springing up as we left, stirring the eucalyptus leaves into whispering life. Bullen strode off at an unnecessarily brisk pace, still visibly angry and showing no sign of wanting either my company or my conversation. We had travelled a good half-mile along the track before he slowed and turned to address me. ‘What a pair of fools we’ve been landed with,’ he said. ‘I’ve been badly let down over this business, Redbourne, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘It’s too early to make a judgement. Give the boy a chance to prove his mettle.’
‘And each as bad as the other,’ he went on, ignoring my intervention. ‘The son incapable of carrying out the simplest task and the father a fount of nonsense. And you should know better, Redbourne – it’s no kindness to encourage a man of his sort by listening to his ramblings.’
‘It seemed to me,’ I said cautiously, ‘that some of his views were worthy of serious consideration.’
‘Preece is a fool and his views are balderdash. What kind of progress do you think we’d have made in a country like this if we’d been guided by such views?
Make no mistake about it, Redbourne, the wilderness doesn’t want us here. We’re engaged in a war, an unending battle with a heartless enemy, and men like Preece, with their crackbrain dreams of harmony, are a menace to us all.’
‘Yet there’s something persuasive in his arguments. Listening to him, I had some notion of a better future – for myself certainly, maybe for all of us.’
‘But look at the man, Redbourne, look at the way he’s living. He’s a throwback, barely one rung up from the savages he evidently consorts with. If I believed that the future of humankind rested in the hands of men like that, I’d cut my throat.’
I wasn’t inclined to let him have the last word on the subject, but as I meditated my reply I became aware of a clamour in the air overhead. I looked up. ‘Ravens,’ said Bullen, lifting an imaginary rifle and drawing a bead on the flock. They were calling as they flew, not in the guttural tones of our own ravens, but high and clear, a disconsolate wailing sound. I watched them cross the pale strip of sky above us, drifting over like flakes of soot, and as I stood gazing, something in their sombre progress and the melancholy music of their cries stirred me so deeply that, just for the barest instant, I imagined myself in uncorrupted communion with the wilderness and the luminous skies above it.
Perhaps Bullen felt something too. As the cries died away, I saw him shiver and clutch his jacket more tightly about his body. Then we turned, moving in unison as though at some inaudible word of command, and made our way slowly back to the hut.
18
It was still dark when we rose the next morning, but by the time the ponies had been watered and loaded up the light was beginning to filter through the mist. Billy appeared to have dressed up for the occasion, in a pair of fawn-coloured breeches, frayed but neatly pressed, and a startlingly white shirt or blouse of unconventional cut, loose-fitting and wide open at the neck. Flitting ahead of us as we set off down the track, he seemed to shimmer and dance on the air, more spirit than substance.
The mist drew off with remarkable suddenness, exposing a serene sky, clear blue overhead but stained towards the west by a long, flattened band of mauve cloud. The sun was still low but it touched the tops of the eucalyptus trees, making the red tips of the leaves glow like fire. Preece and Bullen appeared to be in sombre mood, but I was in a state of strange excitement, my mind alert and all my senses heightened. Everything delighted me – the beaded threads of gossamer strung among the shrubs, the drone of a passing insect, the wet shine of the fern-leaves, the fragrance exhaled from the freshened earth. Every so often I would stop to examine the plants growing beside the track, not with a botanist’s interest but with the curiosity of a child. Running my hand lightly across a cluster of vivid blue florets, I was struck by the thought that I had no name for the plant that bore them, nor for any of the other small plants whose flowers glowed in the muted light beneath the trees. In normal circumstances my ignorance would have irked me, but that morning I took a deep pleasure in the very namelessness of the things around me and I remember wondering, not entirely playfully, whether Adam’s fall might have begun not with the eating of a fruit but earlier, with the arising of the desire to catalogue the animals and plants in his teeming paradise.
The air quickly grew hot but we pressed on without stopping, and a little before midday we emerged on to a tract of more open land, a long slope of grass and low brush punctuated at intervals by small sandstone outcrops. From somewhere higher up, I heard the mellow warbling of an unseen bird and, closer at hand, the faint trickle of water. Preece led the ponies a little uphill, hugging the shade, before bringing them to a halt and beginning to disburden them.
‘Is this it?’ asked Bullen.
Preece gestured obliquely across the slope below us. ‘A couple of hundred yards on, where the scrub thickens again, you’ll start to take a line along the cliff face. It’s not as dangerous as it sounds, but it’s no route for a pony, laden or unladen. Nor,’ he added with a wry smile, ‘for a man with a gammy leg.’ He tugged a bundle clear of its fastenings and handed it to Billy. ‘We’ll just get this done, and then we’ll see about lunch.’
Looking back, I invest that meal with a significance it could hardly have held for me at the time. The sweetfleshed fowl we shared, the bread we broke, the clear water lifted in cupped hands from the trickling rill, all appear now as emblems of untainted wholeness, and our eating and drinking as a valedictory ritual. But then? I was, quite simply, impatient to get on. I remember moving away from my companions as the meal drew to a close and gazing down at the faint line of the track ahead, eagerly tracing its meandering course, its sudden drop and disappearance into the scrub.
‘A word with you, Redbourne,’ said Bullen, stepping up alongside me.
‘What is it?’
‘The boy’s fee. Preece is asking for payment now.’
‘Of course.’ I fumbled in my pocket for my purse but Bullen drew close and gripped me by the arm. ‘Offer him half now and half on our return,’ he whispered into my ear. ‘That way we’ll be sure of the pair of them.’
Something in his words, in his absurd conspiratorial posture, filled me with disgust. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, shaking myself impatiently free of him. ‘If we can’t trust people like Preece and Billy, who can we trust?’
‘For my part,’ he said coldly, ‘I trust no one. You may do as you like.’ He turned on his heel and stalked off.
I called Preece over and paid him the modest fee he requested. He resisted my attempt to give him an additional sum for our food and lodging, observing, with a turn of phrase that would have done credit to a man of a far higher station in life, that he had been amply rewarded by the pleasure of my company and required no other recompense for his hospitality. ‘And this,’ he said, shifting ground before I had time to pursue the matter, ‘is where it begins in earnest. You’ve a testing time ahead, no doubt of it.’
‘You seemed earlier to be making light of the dangers.’
‘I said that the route’s not as dangerous as you might imagine, but it’s no Sunday stroll either, and you’ve more baggage than I’d recommend for the journey. Go carefully. And please’, he added, glancing up anxiously, ‘look after Billy.’
I smiled. ‘I thought Billy was here to look after us.’
‘Oh, he knows the land well enough – I’m not troubled about him on that score. But he’s had very little experience of dealing with people, and Mr Bullen’– he hesitated, lowered his voice – ‘Mr Bullen is a difficult man.’
‘I give you my word,’ I said. ‘B
illy will come to no harm.’
‘Thank you, Mr Redbourne. I’ll be waiting here with the ponies five days from now, Wednesday midday. Billy can time it right, just so long as he’s not hindered. Would you see to it that Mr Bullen doesn’t interfere with his planning?’
I looked up to where Bullen and Billy were stooping together over our kit, their heads almost touching. ‘You’ve no cause for concern,’ I said. ‘Mr Bullen will be as keen as any of us to ensure that everything runs according to plan.’ Preece was silent. I had the distinct impression that he was waiting for me to continue, but there seemed nothing more to say, and after a moment we moved slowly back up the slope to rejoin the others.
Preece was not, it struck me as he took his leave of us, a man given to dissembling his feelings: the perfunctoriness of his farewell to Bullen was in marked contrast to the warmth with which he shook me by the hand. ‘I’ll wish you a safe journey, gentlemen,’ he said. And then, without any of the awkwardness or embarrassment I remember my own father displaying on similar occasions, he took his son in his arms and held him close. ‘And you, too, Billy,’ he whispered, releasing the boy at last and turning quickly away. He mounted the taller of the two ponies and, with the other falling into step behind, rode off the way we had come.
