by Jem Poster
I fingered the fluted surface of the bottle in my pocket. ‘There’s none left,’ I said. ‘We’ve finished it.’
If he recognised the falsehood, he gave no sign of it. He raised his head for a moment and stared out across the swamp at the encroaching shadows; then he slumped back with his arm angled across his face, like a man who has seen more than he can bear.
By nightfall he was delirious again, moaning and gabbling, his fever rising as the air around us cooled. I roused myself and helped him back to the shelter, coaxing and tugging as he crawled painfully over the unforgiving sandstone. I guided him to his makeshift bed and pulled the blanket over his trembling body.
I had some compunction about taking the opium in his presence, but no serious fear of discovery. Kneeling in the darkness beside my bedding like a man at prayer, I silently eased out the cork; then I raised the bottle to my parched lips and took what I thought I needed to see me through the night.
I dreamed vividly and confusedly, and the shout that woke me may well have belonged to that strange interior world of luminous streetscapes and predatory figures, though at the time I assumed that Bullen had cried out. I lit the lamp and held it up.
Bullen had thrown off his blanket and was lying on his back, his eyes wide open and rolled slightly upward. He was whispering to himself, but the words made no sense. I remember thinking, carefully isolating the ideas from the haze that surrounded them, that he must be talking in code to avoid detection, and that unless I could persuade him to speak in English, his secret would be lost for ever.
‘Bullen,’ I said, ‘what is it?’
His lips stopped moving but there was no change in his expression.
‘Bullen?’
He turned towards me; his gaze wavered and came to rest on the lamp. ‘Thank heaven,’ he said. ‘I thought the night would never end.’
I set the lamp on the ground and moved to his side. I had some sense of his delusional state and a fainter if more unsettling awareness of my own, but I was unable to dispel the notion that he had something of the most immense importance to tell me. I leaned over him and placed one hand on his shoulder, and at that moment the flame guttered on the wick, burned suddenly low and went out.
Bullen whimpered in the darkness. ‘I can’t see,’ he said. ‘I’m dying, aren’t I?’
My tongue moved clumsily in my mouth, searching its dry recesses for the words I needed. ‘The lamp’s gone out,’ I said.
A long pause, and then: ‘Can’t you light it?’
‘We’ve no oil.’
‘They’ll have plenty next door,’ he murmured. ‘I’d go myself, only …’
I sat back on my heels and felt his misery flood the little space between us, unignorable as a child’s cry. I fumbled for his blanket and tried to draw it over him, but he reached out convulsively and grasped my forearm. ‘Please,’ he breathed. ‘I must have light.’
I gently loosened his hold. ‘Sssh,’ I said, and the sound shivered and broke far down in my body like a spent wave lapsing on the shore. ‘We need to rest.’ I crawled back to my own side of the shelter and took a quick pull at the paregoric. Then I sank down and lay on my back listening to the deep, unhurried breathing of the wilderness.
24
The sky was just beginning to lighten when I opened my eyes to see her crouching at the entrance, her back towards me and her head bowed. ‘Nell?’
She swivelled round to face me and I saw the baby cradled in her skirts. It was swathed in a filthy shawl, its head hidden deep in the folds, but its smooth brown legs stuck out beyond the hem, kicking stiffly to the jittery rhythms of my pulse.
‘Where did you find it?’ I asked.
She looked at me with a strange, sly smile. ‘I thought you knew,’ she said. ‘The child’s ours.’ She loosened the shawl around the baby’s head and tilted the face towards me. ‘Can’t you tell?’
I strained forward, trying to make out the features, but could see only the sheen of the brown skin. Then Eleanor slid her hand beneath the folds and slipped the shawl right back to the shoulders so that the wicked little face came clear, its glittering eyes staring back at me from beneath the high, domed brow. I knew then that it wasn’t a baby at all, and wanted to tell Eleanor so, but she was gazing down at it with such rapt adoration that I hadn’t the heart to say anything.
After a while she raised her head again. ‘Would you like to hold her?’ she asked.
I drew back, feeling the bile rise in my throat, but she thrust the bundle towards me. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Take her.’ It was impossible to refuse. I held out my arms and, as I did so, the thing lunged at me. I felt its wet mouth clamp on the flesh at the base of my thumb, and its tongue, rough as a cat’s, begin to rasp the skin. ‘Little mischief,’ said Eleanor softly, ‘she’s hungry.’ She tugged the creature away and returned it, kicking and squirming, to her lap; then she undid the buttons of her blouse and laid bare her left breast.
‘Look at her face,’ she said. ‘She knows what she wants.’ She lifted the creature and settled its head in the crook of her arm. I saw its mouth widen to receive the nipple, and I cried out a warning, starting forward and scrambling across the sandy floor; but Eleanor twisted quickly round and, without a word or a backward glance, rose lightly to her feet and walked away.
‘Bullen,’ I whispered. ‘Bullen, did you see her?’ I knelt at his side and shook him gently by the shoulder.
It was the first time I had touched a corpse, but I could tell at once what I was dealing with. Bullen was lying on his side with his face turned away from me and half buried in the folds of his blanket. Sleeping peacefully, I might have said from the look of him, but my fingertips knew better, and my heart contracted in terror. I remember staggering from the lean-to and stumbling barefoot down the path, as though I might find help out there; then my guts clenched in spasm and before I could get my fingers to my belt, I had fouled myself.
We deceive ourselves constantly, in ways at once so subtle and so fundamental that only the sharpest of blows can bring us to our senses. Until that moment I had been a hero or, to put it more accurately, I had been playing the role of one of the heroes of my childhood reading, battling gamely against a dangerous but ultimately tameable universe. I don’t mean that I hadn’t been frightened, but my fear had been tempered by the unspoken assumption of my own invincibility. Now, weak and giddy, lost in that vast wilderness like a glass bead dropped in a cornfield, I felt myself jarred into some new and terrible understanding. Nothing clear, nothing readily explicable; not strictly an illumination, but a tremulous recognition of the darkness that lies concealed beneath our intricately woven fictions. I stood shivering in my soiled breeches and howled at the sky.
I must have cut an abject figure, yet I would have given anything just then, out there in that inhuman solitude, to have been gazed upon by human eyes. I don’t know how long I stood there, but after a while it came to me that I should wash myself down. I made my way slowly to the edge of the swampland and stripped off my clothes; then I squatted above the stagnant seepage and cleaned the filth from my legs as best I could.
Each small action seemed to require an inordinate effort, and by the time I had ferreted out my spare clothes and put them on, the chill had gone from the morning. The still air in the lean-to was growing heavy: a sweetish smell of excrement, a darker undertone of decay. I dosed myself with the last of the paregoric, draining the bottle dry, and then turned my attention to Bullen.
Certain ideas are so firmly established in our minds that it is almost impossible to eradicate them. I realised at once that I possessed neither the tools nor the physical resources to bury the body, yet I found myself unable to dislodge the conviction that it was my duty to do so. After a moment or two of confused deliberation, I knelt at Bullen’s side, gripping his shoulder with one hand and laying the other on his bony hip; and it was only when I felt the body’s stiff resistance to my tentative coaxing that the sheer absurdity of the enterprise was borne home to
me. I sat back on my heels and felt the heat rising through my own body, licking upward like an unguarded flame.
‘Burn it,’ she said.
I started and swung round, expecting to see her there at the entrance again, but there was no sign of her. Yet the voice had been as clear as if she had been standing at my shoulder. I stumbled outside and looked up and down the track.
‘Nell,’ I called, and my voice came ringing back to me from the cliffs, mingled with hers. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Do it now.’
I ducked back into the lean-to and gathered up my belongings, stuffing them haphazard into my pack; then I spread my blanket and piled on to it the wallaby skins and bird carcasses, a foul jumble of sticky fur and dulled feathers. I folded the blanket over them and roped it up to form a loose bale. The effort left me trembling and breathless, and while I was resting she drew close again, so close that I could feel her voice resonating in the aching hollow of my own throat.
‘You can’t carry these things,’ she said, and I felt her hand pass across my face, light as breath and moving with such expressive delicacy that the tears sprang to my eyes. ‘You don’t have the strength.’
‘I’m only taking what needs to be taken.’
Some faint stir in the air around me signalled disapproval. ‘Let it burn,’ she said. ‘Everything.’
I remember the anger rising in me then, anger at her persistence, at her unwanted interference in my affairs. ‘It’s not your business,’ I shouted, tugging at the bale, manoeuvring it clumsily towards the entrance. But as I cried out, something flared and roared – whether within me or around I couldn’t tell – and I staggered and fell heavily against the wall of the shelter. Then I knew that I should have to do as she said.
There was no shortage of tinder – the ground inside and around the shelter was littered with eucalyptus leaves – but in my weakened state I took some time to gather all I needed. Little by little I raised a small mound of the brittle debris at the entrance before transferring it, in rustling handfuls, to the space between Bullen’s body and the brushwood wall.
I struck a match and leaned over and, as I did so, I was seized by anxiety. Was some ritual required? Some form of words? If you had asked me six months earlier, posing the question in theoretical form, I should doubtless have said that the freed soul has no need of ceremony and that – supposing such a place or state to exist – it will find its way to heaven unaided. Now, stooped above Bullen’s earthly remains, I was tormented by the fancy that some omission on my part might doom his spirit to an eternity of aimless wandering among the trees and lowering crags. I blew out the match and began to pray, cobbling together such phrases as I could remember from the prayer book with others of my own invention. When I ran out of words, I took a handful of leaves and scattered them over the body.
Whether because of the trembling of my hands or the faint dampness still in the leaves at that early hour, I found it more difficult than I had anticipated to ignite the heap. The oils would flare and sputter at the touch of the match and then, almost as suddenly, the flame would die back along the blackened edges of the leaves. After the third attempt, I sat back on my heels and drew out my pocket-book. I tore half a dozen pages from the back and twisted them loosely, one by one, inserting them at intervals along the base of the heap. And as I did so, Daniel’s mournful face slipped from between the pages and fluttered to the ground.
Nothing could have prepared me for the violence of her intervention, the terrible jolt of anger she sent through me as I stared down at the photograph. She said nothing, nothing at all, but her intention was as plain as if she had screamed the words in my ear. I picked up the little scrap and placed it on the pyre. Then I struck another match and set it to the twists of paper, coaxing each in turn into flickering life.
That did the trick. The flames licked up the heap and began to eat at the base of the wall so that the brushwood crackled and spat. I piled on more debris, but there was no need. I felt the heat strike upwards as the fire took hold, and I withdrew from the shelter and moved upwind of the blaze, my eyes smarting.
I might attribute my languor to sickness, or to the effects of the opium; or it may have been that the flames offered a spectacular and welcome diversion from darker thoughts. Whatever the reason, I stood gazing in a kind of trance as the blaze intensified, and it was only when the breeze stiffened and veered, scattering sparks and burning leaves in my direction, that I saw with any degree of clarity the implications of my action. ‘Nell,’ I whispered, thinking she might have further instructions for me, but I could hear nothing through the roar of the burning brushwood.
It was the smell of scorched flesh and feathers, reaching me as the wall lurched inward and the roof subsided, that spurred me into action. I stumbled to the track and set off in the direction of a civilisation whose very existence in this wild and remote corner of the earth seemed suddenly questionable.
25
I had no strategy; I was in no condition to formulate one. Weak and confused, I had only the vaguest notion of the distance I should have to travel or of the time it might take me to cover the ground. The nausea and cramps were less troublesome now, but I was afflicted by a raging thirst and so preoccupied by my immediate need for water that nothing else seemed important. Every so often I would stop and listen, and occasionally I would hear, or perhaps merely sense, what might have been a thin trickle through overgrown or subterranean channels; but each time, my investigations proved fruitless.
I’m not sure how long I had been walking when I came upon the gully, but the sun was high in the sky, filtering through the branches almost directly overhead. The terrain below the track was less precipitous here, a rocky slope falling away into densely wooded shadow. The gully cut through it at right angles to the track, its course marked by a lush growth of fern and sedge.
I leaned out cautiously and sniffed the air. Moist earth and leaves; a cleaner undertone I could only interpret as fresh water. I stepped gingerly on to the slope and began to follow the line of the gully down, hugging its edge. The shadows deepened around me and the air grew cooler.
I don’t know whether it was the change of atmosphere, operating on a system sensitised by illness, that affected me at that moment, but I found myself suddenly struggling for breath and balance. My legs trembled violently and my vision dimmed. I sat down heavily among the tumbled rocks and, as I reached out to steady myself, the singing began.
I call it singing, but there was nothing melodic about the sound. A chant perhaps, a rhythmic, humming monotone swelling and diminishing among the trees, vocal rather than percussive, yet unlike any human voice I had ever heard. I listened for a minute or two, maybe longer, and little by little it dawned on me that the sound came from the gully. I scrambled to my feet and looked over.
The creature was only a few feet below the lip, crouching among the ferns, but I couldn’t make it out at first. I mean, I could see the curve and pale sheen of the bowed back, a white heel braced against a fissure in the sandstone, but I couldn’t make any sense of what I was looking at. I squatted down, angling for a better view, and as I did so, the thing raised its head and I saw that it was Daniel huddled there, stripped to his glistening skin and quivering like a trapped rabbit. His mouth was open but the singing, I realised in that instant of astonished recognition, had stopped.
He stared up at me, his eyes gleaming; his voice was as light as the breeze in the eucalyptus leaves. I leaned forward, straining to catch his words.
‘I could have stayed,’ he whispered, ‘only you wouldn’t have it. Sent me out into the dark alone.’
I said nothing, watching his eyes the way you’d watch the eyes of a wild animal. He ran his tongue along his upper lip. ‘You could let me in now,’ he said.
He raised his arms above his head like a small child asking to be picked up, but the opium had made me as cunning as he was, and I could see at once what he was after. I backed away from the edge and turned to run, but he hauled himself up the slo
pe and lunged at me, clutching at my ankles so that I stumbled and went sprawling among the ferns. I felt his hands fumbling at my back – a soft fluttering, at once tender and malign. Then he began to test the space between my shoulderblades, pressing insistently on the spine, and I braced myself and clenched my heart like a fist, knowing that if he were to find a way through to its warm chambers, I should be lost.
‘Let me in,’ he pleaded. I looked over my shoulder and saw his face hanging above me, but crumpled now and streaked with tears. I shook my head and his features seemed to shift and blur like the contours of a stone seen through running water. ‘Daniel,’ I said very gently, my fear subsiding as the pressure on my back diminished, ‘you died. Last winter, in Jack Waller’s barn.’
He bent close to my ear and spoke again, but there were no words any more, just the faint whisper of breath passing between his fading lips and out into the damp air. He brushed my face with his fingertips and I raised my arm to push him away, but he was already drawing off, dissolving among the trees like a scarf of mist.
I lay there for a moment, my cheek pressed to the ground, trying to bring my trembling limbs under control; then I rose clumsily to my feet and dusted the debris from my jacket. I was anxious to leave the shadows and rejoin the track, but it was obvious that I couldn’t expect to travel much further without water. I listened again, holding my breath, staring into the gloom until something came clear: a curved ridge of stone overhung by ferns, black water brimming at the lip. Thinking about it later, I wondered how I could have seen the pool from where I stood, but I’m tolerably certain that, as I scrambled down the slope to the gully floor, I knew already what I should find and where I should find it. I pushed my hands in among the fronds until my palms touched water; then I crouched down, beastlike, and drank greedily, sucking cold mouthfuls from just beneath the oily surface.
