by Jem Poster
21
Bullen was waiting for us. He was sitting beside the track with his elbows resting on his knees and his head bowed, the very picture of despondency.
‘It’s in there somewhere,’ he said, rising to his feet as we drew level with him, ‘but God knows where.’ His voice was dull and his movements, I noticed, as he slung his rifle across his shoulder and stepped forward, were heavy and listless. ‘I shall have to come back tomorrow.’
‘I understood,’ I said, ‘that we had other plans for tomorrow.’
‘I want that bird, Redbourne, and I’m damn well going to get it. The valley can wait.’
Our agreement had been vague, admittedly, but his words implied a thoroughly unacceptable interpretation of the arrangement between us. I was about to respond, and sharply too, when I caught the look in his eye. I don’t want to overstate the case, but I had the fleeting impression of something crazed there; not much more than a glimmer, but sufficient to give me pause. I held my tongue and we moved off in strained silence, a silence not broken until we reached the cascade.
Billy was there first. He put his face to the rock and sucked up the water in long, noisy draughts while Bullen unstrapped the canteen and pulled out the cork.
‘Let me in,’ he said, elbowing Billy aside.
The boy gave ground, but with evident reluctance. ‘There’s enough for everyone,’ he said. Bullen made no reply, but held the canteen in the wavering flow until it was full. I saw him lift it to his lips, then lower it suddenly, thrusting it at Billy, his eyes fixed fiercely on a point further along the track and a little above head height. ‘Take it,’ he muttered. And then, more urgently, still without looking at the boy: ‘Take the bloody thing.’
Billy could have had no clearer understanding of the situation than I had, but he reached out and snatched the canteen from Bullen’s outstretched hand. Bullen slipped his rifle from his shoulder and took aim, and it was only then, following the line of the barrel, that I became aware of the bird.
I could only just make it out, a wedge of fragmented colour half concealed among the leaves of an overhanging banksia, but I knew at once that this was Bullen’s dream-bird, and that he had been given a second chance. I caught a glimpse of the long tail-feathers and, as the creature turned on its perch, a startling flash of red.
It could hardly have been an accident – Billy, usually so sure-footed and circumspect, stepping forward at that precise moment with a townsman’s clumsiness, stirring the dry litter with his feet. The shot was snatched and an instant too late: the bird was already winging away low and fast under cover of the scrub. Bullen dropped his rifle, swung round and caught the boy by the shoulder, ramming him back against the blotched bole of a paperbark. I stepped in quickly, dragging at his outstretched arm. ‘Let the lad alone, Bullen. You’ll hurt him.’
He drew back his hand and whipped round to face me. ‘That was deliberate,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Malicious sabotage.’ And then, rounding once more on Billy: ‘What in the devil’s name do you think you’re playing at?’
Billy looked up at him, his eyes sullen under his dark brows. ‘You’ve ripped my shirt,’ he said flatly. ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Damn your shirt, boy – you can get yourself another.’
‘There isn’t another. Not like this.’ He was probing the torn cloth, running his fingers over the exposed skin below his collarbone. ‘My mother gave it to me,’ he said, and with the words his face crumpled and he began to cry, quietly at first and then more wildly, his thin body racked by long, shuddering sobs. Bullen stared down at him for a moment, then turned on his heel and stalked off down the track.
I pulled a handkerchief from my jacket pocket and held it out. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Stop that and dry your eyes.’
He snatched the cloth and passed it quickly over his face, but the sobbing continued almost unabated. He struggled to speak, the words catching in his throat. ‘She didn’t want to leave’– he swallowed hard, dabbed at his eyes – ‘but it was time. She folded it up …’
There was a long pause.
‘The shirt? She folded the shirt?
He nodded, dumb with misery; the tears poured down his cheeks. He began to mime the act, moving with such poignant delicacy that I seemed to see the woman’s dark hands passing across the white cotton, tucking, folding, smoothing. ‘And then,’ he said, ‘she put one hand up like this’ – he reached towards me, the gesture bringing her so close that I felt the brush of her fingertips on my own skin – ‘and she told me …’ He pressed his knuckles to his mouth and closed his eyes.
‘Told you what?’
He turned away, shaking his head helplessly from side to side; and as I looked at his quaking shoulders, something of my old longing quickened and flared. It even occurred to me that I might take him in my arms and comfort him but Daniel was mixed up in it all too, that troubled soul whose unassuageable grief had shown me the inefficacy of my own confused love, and the impulse faltered and died. I glanced down the track to where Bullen brooded, still as a statue, above the valley rim.
‘We need to get on,’ I said, moving away. ‘Dry your eyes now and join us when you’re ready.’
Bullen turned as I approached, his face still dark with anger. ‘We should have known better,’ he said savagely. ‘I’d sooner have no guide at all than that misbegotten half-and-half.’
‘Go easy on him, Bullen. He’s not much more than a child.’
‘Exactly. And we’re not nursemaids. I tell you, we’d be a good deal better off without him.’
‘Sssh. He’ll hear you.’ I glanced over my shoulder. Billy had evidently managed to stem his tears and was moving slowly down the track towards us.
‘I don’t give a damn whether he hears me or not. He’s lost me a prize, Redbourne, a real prize, and I see no reason to spare his feelings.’
Billy had undoubtedly heard him. As he drew close to us he lifted his head, addressing himself pointedly to me. ‘I can leave now if Mr Bullen wants me to,’ he said.
‘Mr Bullen is angry, Billy. He doesn’t mean what he says. We’re both grateful to you for accompanying us.’
The colour deepened in Bullen’s hollow cheeks. ‘I’ll thank you to let me express my own opinions,’ he said. ‘I’ve a tongue of my own, and what I’ve said, I’ll stand by.’
‘This is absurd, Bullen. We need the boy’s help. Besides, we have some responsibility for his welfare.’
‘You’ve no call to worry on my account, Mr Redbourne. I’m as safe in these mountains as I am in my da’s back yard.’
Bullen flung out his hand in a brusque gesture of dismissal. ‘Let him go,’ he said. ‘I can find the way back.’
Was it some premonitory tremor that passed through me as he spoke? I was suddenly swept by an anxiety so intense that, just for a second or two, I felt myself on the brink of falling. I remember reaching out and grasping convulsively at Billy’s arm. ‘You’re not to leave,’ I said. ‘Do you hear me? Don’t listen to him.’
I can hardly blame the lad. He would have seen in my momentary panic an opportunity to hit back at his tormentor, and the temptation must have been irresistible. I saw his eyes narrow.
‘I’ll stay,’ he said, ‘if Mr Bullen tells me he’s sorry.’
Bullen shot the boy a look of such undisguised malevolence that I wondered whether he might drop him on the spot. Then he turned abruptly and moved off down the track. I hoped that might be the end of the matter, but Billy sprang forward, tucking in behind him like a terrier at his master’s heels.
‘Come on,’ he shouted excitably at Bullen’s broad back, his brown feet dancing on the dry leaves. ‘Say it. Sorry. Sorry. Like that. It’s not so much to ask for, is it?’
Bullen spun round, his face contorted. ‘What you’re asking for,’ he shouted, ‘is a prime thrashing, and I’ve a good mind to give it to you.’ I could see again the terrible wildness in his eyes, and it struck me with disquieting clarity that Billy was making a serious
misjudgement. I stepped forward quickly. ‘Billy,’ I said, ‘calm yourself. Let Mr Bullen alone. He’ll apologise in his own good time.’
Bullen raised his head slowly, as though with difficulty, transferring his unsettling gaze to me. ‘Apologise?’ he spat. ‘To this jumped-up by-blow? I’d as soon beat myself senseless with an iron bar.’
The boy muttered something under his breath, inaudible to me, I confess, but Bullen started forward and let fly at him. More a cuff than a punch, but delivered with vindictive force. Billy dodged back and the blow fell short. I thought at first that it was Bullen, teetering with his left hand extended at the edge of the drop, who was in danger; but in fact it was Billy who, stumbling sideways, lost his footing and was gone.
If he made any sound – any utterance, I mean, any cry of despair or alarm – I don’t recall it. Only the rush of loosened debris slipping away down the cliff face and pattering through the canopy below; and, in the appalling hush that followed, the quick rasp of my own breath. I stepped to the edge and peered down into the gloom.
‘Holloa!’ I called, scanning the shadows for any sign of movement. ‘Can you hear me, Billy?’ My voice echoed briefly from the rocks around, but there was no answering shout.
‘You heard him,’ said Bullen, lurching towards me and laying hold of my arm. ‘You heard what the pup said to me.’
‘Never mind about that. Did we bring the rope with us?’
He was staring at me as though I had addressed him in a foreign language.
‘The rope, Bullen. Where is it?’
‘Back at the camp. Look, you saw how it was. I’d never knowingly—’
‘We can discuss it later.’ I broke his hold on my sleeve and hurried down the track as fast as the failing light and the dangerous terrain allowed.
The rope was coiled on the platform just outside the lean-to. Unnecessary weight, I had thought, watching Bullen lash it to Billy’s pack the previous day, but now the coil struck me as regrettably insubstantial, a bare thirty feet, at a rough reckoning, of flimsy hemp. I seized it and stumbled back up the track.
Bullen was exactly where I had left him, but squatting on his haunches now, his shoulders bent forward and his head between his arms, as though he were trying to lose himself among the rocks and scrub. I was almost upon him before he looked up.
‘What use do you imagine that will be?’ he asked, eyeing the rope.
Darkness falling, the rock face dropping away below us to indeterminate depth, the rope itself not much above a tether’s length. The question was, in its way, a good one, but I was finding in action some antidote to the panic at my heart. I hitched one end of the rope to the base of a sturdy sapling and tugged the knot tight.
‘The lad’s dead,’ Bullen continued. ‘Dead or dying. If he weren’t we’d have heard him call out by now.’
I passed the free end of the rope once round the base of a second tree, looped it beneath my arms and tied it securely. ‘Let it run as I need it,’ I said. ‘No slack. I’ll give a shout when I’m ready to come up again.’
‘It’s a pointless risk. Leave it until daylight, at least.’
I positioned myself above the drop. ‘I’m going down,’ I said. ‘With or without your assistance.’
‘You’re a fool, Redbourne. Take it from me, there’s nothing to be gained by a display of schoolboy heroics.’
I was stung by the remark, but not deflected. ‘Are you going to help?’ I asked.
‘You’ve no experience in these matters,’ he said. ‘You’d do well to defer to mine.’
It was, given the circumstances of the accident, an astonishing remark, and I think Bullen himself recognised as much. At all events, he stepped abruptly forward and took up the rope, bracing his left hip and shoulder against the sapling it was tied to. I leaned back gently, gauging resistance; then I dropped to my knees and eased myself over the edge.
The face was steep but not quite vertical, and though I could see very little, I found no great difficulty in feeling my way down. I went cautiously at first, testing each hold offered by the sandstone or the stunted scrub, acutely aware of the slenderness of the rope that half supported me; but as I continued my descent I began to move more freely, with a confidence – no, more than that, with an exhilaration generated, I think, by the very precariousness of my situation. I had a fleeting recollection of my childhood dreams of power – the delirious fluency of the body’s progress across landscapes strewn with irrelevant obstacles – and then my right foot, feeling for the next toehold, found nothing but air. Hopelessly unbalanced, I slid sideways, scrabbling at the rock, and fell into space.
The shock of my fall and the jolt as the rope arrested it were almost simultaneous. For a long moment I hung inert, turning and swaying with the movement of my fragile lifeline, staring down into the shadows under my feet; then I raised my head and looked around.
I could see at once how matters stood. I was suspended immediately beneath an outcrop of rock, an irregular protrusion heavily undercut from below. It was on the overhang, I realised, that I had lost my balance, feeling for a foothold that simply wasn’t there. I knew that, provided the rope held, I was in no immediate danger; my task now was to bring my feet back into contact with the cliff-face.
‘Bullen! I shouted. ‘Haul me up. Easy as you go.’
His answer came back, but very faintly, the words lost on the breeze. I hung there, listening, waiting, alert to every tremor of the rope. I had my eye on a tuft of scrub a few feet above my head. When I draw level with that, I said to myself, I shall be back in control. I watched intently for a minute or more, and with each lapsing second I felt my terror mounting, blind and ungovernable as a rising tide.
‘Bullen!’ I yelled again, my voice shrill now, and horribly raw. ‘Bullen! Pull me up!’
There are, I imagine, few circumstances so terrible that the imagination cannot make them more so. As I hung there, revolving slowly in my flimsy harness above that inscrutable vacancy, it came to me that Bullen must have decided to do away with me. Later, reflecting on the moment, I would discover or invent reason enough for having entertained such an idea, but what flashed through my mind at the time had nothing to do with reason. It was an image, shadowy but compelling: Bullen’s tall figure stooping beside the sapling at the far end of the rope, his long fingers fumbling at the knot.
I kicked out in panicky spasm and strained upward, gripping the rope as high above my head as I could reach. The lack of any purchase for my feet made the action peculiarly difficult and, as I jerked and twisted in the void like a hooked fish, it occurred to me that my struggles might be futile. But fear lent me strength: little by little, hand over hand, I drew myself upward until I felt my boot soles strike rock.
‘Praise,’ I remember my mother saying, ‘must be heartfelt or it is nothing.’ As I established my footing more securely, wedging my boots firmly against cleft stone and knotted scrub, it seemed to me that I knew for the first time what heartfelt praise might be. In other circumstances, I might have dropped to my knees and raised my voice to the heavens; as it was, I set my lips against the dry sandstone, feeling with a giddy exultation the day’s heat still contained in it, and breathed thanks for my deliverance.
The line went taut: Bullen taking up the slack, hauling me in. It was easy now, my body held and steadied, my feet and hands clever in the deepening gloom. As I drew level with the top, Bullen knelt and took hold of my collar, but I had no need of his assistance. I remember crying out, with a mixture of relief and triumph, as I breasted the lip and threw myself face down on the track; and I recall, too, the pungent scent of some herb or shrub coming off the stained sleeves of my shirt, sharp as smelling salts. I lay still, breathing deeply, feeling my heart hammering against the packed earth.
When I raised my head I found Bullen still kneeling close at my side, watching me intently. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Did you find him?’
I have to confess that Billy’s plight had been thrust to the back of my mind b
y my own trials. I must have hesitated, because Bullen found it necessary to prompt me. ‘The boy,’ he said. ‘Is there any sign of him?’
‘I’ve found nothing, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to find.’
He opened his mouth as though to reply, but swayed suddenly from the waist and lurched sideways. He put one hand to the ground to steady himself and I saw, in the violent trembling of his extended arm, how deeply the fever had taken hold. I recognised then the preposterousness of my earlier expectation: in health Bullen might conceivably have hauled my dead weight up from beneath the overhang, but his sickness had made him as weak as a baby. I scrambled to my feet, slipping free of the rope.
‘Come on,’ I said firmly. ‘I’ll help you back.’
He rose with difficulty, moving as though dazed. ‘I don’t say there’s nothing to find,’ he said slowly, ‘but I can tell you there’ll be nothing worth the finding.’ He shuffled over to the sapling and bent stiffly to unfasten the rope.
‘Leave it,’ I said, more sharply than I had intended. ‘We’ll come back at first light and try again.’
He shook his head wearily but said nothing. I gathered the rope in loose coils and dropped it at the side of the track. ‘We must do everything we can,’ I said. ‘We certainly can’t leave the area without making a more thorough search.’ I took up his satchel, feeling the meaty weight of the birds’ bodies as it swung from my hand, and we moved on.
I must have appeared rather brutal, urging him on over that rough terrain when it was clear that each step drew heavily on his diminishing reserves of strength. Every so often I would grip him by the elbow, trying to support and steer him where the track seemed most uneven, but each time he shook me off. After a while he stopped and lowered himself unsteadily to the ground.
