Bereft (14 page)

He took up a plank of wood and stood, half crouching, like a large bird preparing to take flight, his coat puddled on the floor beside him. The girl arrived in the doorway, clutching a bulging flour bag to her chest. Quinn raised the length of wood as if to strike.

A look of childish betrayal passed over Sadie's features. “Don't hurt me,” she said.

The words were almost inaudible but their meaning was clear to him in the begging of her eyes.

“Who's with you?” he demanded.

“No one.”

“Don't lie to me.”

“There's no one.”

“I heard voices.”

The girl mumbled something.

“What?”

“I was singing a song.”

Quinn paused. He angled his head the way the half-blind did to better make out shapes or movement, but heard nothing more. If the girl had brought Dalton or his father, they would have shown themselves by now. He relaxed but kept the piece of wood at the ready.

“Where have you been?”

She hefted her sack by way of answer.

“What's that?”

“I was out getting food for us. Early morning is the best time.”

“Who gave it to you?”

She laughed humourlessly. “No one
gave
it to me.”

Quinn wiped his mouth and approached her. She was watching the length of wood, as if preparing to leap clear should he attempt to strike her with it. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her hot body against his own. Then he dragged her squirming and wriggling outside.

She was telling the truth: there was no one there. He released her.

She stood rigid, head down, her hair a lank curtain across her face. The knuckles of the hand holding the bag were white with anger. A floral bruise marked the skin of her inner wrist where Quinn had gripped her. He dropped the wood to the ground.

She flung the bag at him and several items tumbled out. She said something, but it was only when Quinn failed to respond that she looked at him. Her eyes glittered like water at the bottom of a well. “Don't touch me again or I'll cut the eyes out of you.”

Ashamed, Quinn stared at the ground to see what had fallen from the bag. A loaf of bread and a tin of jam. Inside, he could see a small bottle of whiskey, a tin of tobacco, some flour, four apples and there, resting against his boot, two oranges. He raised his head to speak to the girl—a
sorry
or
thank you
—but she had gone.

12

F
or twenty minutes, Quinn called out for Sadie and searched the bushland around the shack, but there was no sign of her. She was gone. He chastised himself for his mistrust, packed the food back into the flour bag and left it inside the shack. With some effort, losing his way now and then, he stumbled down to his father's house alone. He sheltered in the shade of the bloodwood tree until he was sure there was no one around, then went to his mother's bedside.

His mother's eyes fluttered open when he entered, then she fell back asleep. Quinn mopped her brow. Her health seemed worse than ever, and he despaired at the possibility that his visits might have been doing more harm than good. There were several bottles of tablets on the dresser by her bed. Quinine, aspirin and Dr Morse's Indian Root Pills—
Keep clean inside and out and minimise the risk of influenza.

After several minutes, she woke again and smiled. They talked of trivial things. Through the morning he told her palatable bits and pieces from his years at war: the excitement of joining up; of becoming friends with a soldier from Adelaide called George Kenward; of crossing the English Channel at night, its sickening chop and yaw under low clouds.

“Parts of France are beautiful,” he told her, hardly aware of what he was saying, speaking to fill the vacuum, hoping to rejuvenate her somehow. “The parts away from the war, that is. Such old buildings. They have woods there. Forests, like in the fairy tales you told us when we were children.”

His mother didn't answer, but he was heartened to see her nod.

“We walked through one at night,” he continued. “It was dark, of course, so I didn't see very much. There were hundreds of us walking along the road. On the grass and through the trees. Men and horses and mules, as quiet as we could be, talking only now and then to save our energy. The next day we were due to attack a village full of Germans.”

His mother whispered something.

Quinn leaned in. “Pardon, Mother?”

“Were you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“But you went on?”

“There wasn't much choice. I prayed a lot.”

Mary opened her eyes. “When you were small enough to hold in my arms, your heart used to beat so fast I wondered if, in fact, you didn't have
two
hearts in your chest. You were always brave.”

Quinn flinched. “Well,” he said after a silence, “there were a few hundred of us trudging along. It was cold, and we could see our breath when we exhaled. It was like smoke, as if we were already on fire. Mainly you followed the fellow in front, kept walking, didn't think too much.”

Quinn recalled seeing an owl on the sheared and blackened stump of a tree. The bird gazed at them dispassionately, as if it had stood on that very spot for centuries and watched passing armies. The Gauls, the Romans. Bridles clanked in the darkness. Every now and again someone tripped on a tree root or a piece of wreckage and cursed. Quinn kept his eyes down, concentrated on his footfalls. The air smelled of muddy leaves, of damp wool and of horse sweat.

“After a while the darkness changed colour. We thought we had entered a valley, or a large dip in the landscape because the night became misty. It was too early for morning. We checked our maps. Then we heard several hollow sounds, a sort of
pot
, followed by another, then another. There was a curious smell—almost recognisable, but not quite—a bit like wet hay. I remember a fellow stumbled to his knees to pray. Then more men did the same. There were lots of men on their knees in the mist, as if the lower parts of their legs had sunk into the mud.”

He wiped his mother's hot brow. “Gas. We were being shelled with gas. We got on all fours, down low, the way we had been taught, but some blokes panicked and couldn't get the masks on. They aren't always easy to put on. Your hands shake and the strap catches on things. And it was dark, of course. Some men breathed the gas in and had to be carried the rest of the way through the night, to the battle.”

The gas had stewed in ditches and wreathed about them as they marched on. They waited for another, louder assault that never came. Some men threw themselves to the ground and had to be coaxed to standing again, so keen were they to enwomb themselves into the earth. Quinn's own breathing was hot and loud and close in his ears as if, with the mask and its eye shields and tubes and clasps, he had been transformed into a sinister machine. They walked on through the toxic gruel, and those who had been boastful became solemn.

The ground around them was littered with broken equipment, with empty boxes of ammunition, scraps of uniform, books, rubble. He saw a large wall clock. Bicycle wheels and motor-car tyres. The inert bodies of dead men. Crockery, wooden boxes. Papers blew about here and there. A collection of muddy boots, dozens of muddy stretchers. An officer sitting cross-legged on a table watched them as they trudged past and, although his face was obscured by his own mask, his expression was one of grim mockery as he drew a finger across his throat. A pair of chairs, helmets and hats, bully tins, trees stark and broken against the pale sky.

After some time, Quinn became aware of objects crunching beneath his boots. When he crouched to investigate, he discovered they had been walking on small birds that had fallen dead from the trees. Their bodies were plump and stiff. They looked the size of a child's heart, and he carried one of them in his palm, God only knew why, through the long night until they came to a field at dawn, whereupon he lay down and slept. When he woke hours later, the bird was still cupped in his hand. Its red feathers blew about in the breeze. Its tongue was a pellet of lead. A minister was moving through the coughing and groaning men, among boys suddenly made old. He assured them God was with them in their struggle. Someone wept, another man called out over and over until he was taken elsewhere.

Quinn and his mother sat in silence for several minutes. “I'm sorry,” he said, “I shouldn't have told you that. You don't need to know those things.” He felt foolish, ashamed.

She waved away his concern. “I take it you didn't see Little Red Riding Hood, then? Or that damn wolf?”

He grinned. “No. They are just stories, Mother.”

“Stories are rarely only stories,” she chided him.

He told her of the battle for the village of Pozières, or what he remembered of it (a blue flare wriggling back to earth, the grunt and shriek of artillery) before a shell had exploded near him and thrown him to the ground. It was perhaps that incident that had prompted the inaccurate news of his death. There were worse things that happened, in the weeks and months that followed, but of these he told his mother nothing. There were no words to convey the horror of what he saw during the war or, rather, that to describe it would require every word of the language, all of them at once, until they no longer made sense.

Quinn had a sudden thought. “Mother? Do you remember a family called Fox living in the district?”

Mary repeated the name to herself, dipped into the well of her memory. “
Fox
. Yes, I do remember something. Out on Sutton Ridge. Terribly poor. I think the mother was a seamstress. Father ran off. Yes.” She snorted. “That's right, your father heard somewhere the woman was involved in magic, which I very much doubt. Probably heard it down at that fool Sully's place. In fact my brother told me he had tried to help them recently, but the woman told him to shove off. Why do you want to know, Quinn?”

“Curious, that's all. I met a man in France who knew them.” He kissed his mother's forehead, and stood to leave. “I have to go. You're tired. I'll come back tomorrow.”

Mary closed her eyes. She looked better for his visit. Perhaps the conversation did her good, after all? Before he passed through the doorway, she called to him. “Quinn. What was it Sarah used to call you? That funny name, when she was young and couldn't say your name properly? I was wondering about it the other day, racking my brains, trying to remember.”

“Pim.”

“Ah, yes. Dear thing she was.”

13

Q
uinn lit a candle, a puny defence against the darkness. Outside, insects thripped in the warm night and bats hung from branches in heavy clumps. He had shed most of his uniform on account of the heat and wore only trousers and a singlet. His exposed arms and ankles were thin and hairless. About him on the floor was an archipelago of discarded uniform: his trench coat, boots, tunic, the satchel with the gas mask.

Sadie was in the next room singing some popular song to herself and playing a game that involved slapping something against the floor. This was followed by the scrabble and shake of small items. Slap and scrabble. Slap, slap. It was extremely annoying, but he had resolved to let her be following the incident that morning with the bag of food. She had only returned at nightfall and still not spoken to him. The girl was unbalanced; it was obvious in the slide of her gait and the drift of her eyes. Orphans, Quinn suspected, were usually possessed of cunning and frailty in equal measure, each of which was a form of desperation. Sadie was no different. He had pondered leaving her but resolved to stay, for now at least. He supposed the girl needed him and, besides, he had to remain, for his mother's sake.

She began singing again with the pegged-nose intonation of a phonograph singer he had himself recently heard.
Smile and the world
smiles with you, weep and you weep alone. La la la la clouds have silver linings
la la la la getting through.

From a trouser pocket Quinn took a battered match-safe, and from the tin tube drew a piece of paper that had been folded and refolded like a minuscule map. He had carried this note from the girl Margaret ever since that London séance. He knew what was written on it, but couldn't help checking it every so often—as one might a note from a sweetheart—in the hope the words could be experienced anew or that another, hidden meaning should become apparent. In the bedraggled scrawl, by now almost illegible, was the same phrase he'd read on the scrap of paper all those months ago. He stared at it for several minutes.