Bereft (3 page)

After an awkward silence, the young man asked where he was going.

“Flint,” Quinn replied.

Mr. Westbury nodded, although it was clear he had never heard of the place. Few people had. There was little reason to visit, now that the gold had been mined. Hardly anyone lived there. Not even cartographers bothered with it anymore.

“That's your home, I take it?”

Quinn observed this starched fellow, who had told him he was ineligible for military service on account of an impairment with his vision. He shrugged and drew on his cigarette, which caused a mild coughing fit.

“I suppose it is,” he said when he'd recovered. “It is where I was born. There is something I need to set right.”

Mr. Westbury dabbed impatiently at his forehead with his handkerchief. “Well, lots of places have gone to wrack and ruin, you know. Lots of places.” It seemed he had lost interest.

Quinn threw down his cigarette and ground it out under his boot heel. A woman and her young daughter indicated they wished to pass, prompting Quinn and his new companion to stand back as far as the cramped space would allow.

They remained silent until the man, who had again been staring at the muddled scar along his jaw, motioned for him to lean in and said, in a tiptoeing voice, “You should do something about your face. Cover it up, perhaps? Do you have a flu mask? You are frightening the children, you know.”

And Quinn, usually so reserved but seized by the devil, replied, also in a whisper, “Well, the children have good reason to be frightened.”

At Bathurst he slunk from the station and began walking north-west. He left the town and kept going, at times along the road, at others clambering across plains or ragged outcrops of rocks. The earth was dry and hard under his feet, and the sky—blue and cloudless—yawned overhead, higher and more vast than any skies he had seen elsewhere in the world, a continent unto itself. Hawks circled like dark, watchful stars disentangled from their orbits.

He unpicked his name tag from his tunic and avoided places he might encounter people who could recognise him. The few farmers he saw nodded or waved their hats, glad to welcome home a soldier from the Great War. A family lumbered past with their possessions and five children piled atop a horse-drawn cart. The mouth and nose of each was covered by a gauze mask and they stared away and offered no greeting, obviously terrified of contagion. By and large, people paid him no heed. The sight of people walking alone was not so unusual after a war; there must be entire armies of men returning home, each in a ragged uniform, wandering tiny across the face of the earth. He had a nap beneath cypress trees in the middle of the day and pressed on until it was too dark to continue.

The countryside teemed with animals. Lizards and snakes, rosellas and magpies. At dusk, grey kangaroos bobbed in grassy fields and stood on their hind legs to watch him pass. Rabbits darted at the edges of his vision, and pairs of orange butterflies flitted about him wherever he walked. And the hum, always the hum, heard even through his murky hearing, of flies and bees.

He was accustomed to walking long distances and made good progress. It was pleasant to feel so free, despite the trappings of war he carried still—his kitbag, the satchel with his gas mask, and his revolver jammed beneath his unbuttoned tunic. He took no bearings but just walked as if his forward motion might unravel the stink of war and all that had happened in the years he'd been away. Mirages trembled along the horizon. He saw massive vessels, a line of elephants, once an entire city with buildings and steeples, some vast metropolis that receded, then receded, then receded every time he drew near.

At the close of each day the sun sank from sight and set the horizon aglow for ten minutes. He camped away from the road and stared into the flames of his fire, his human replacement for the vanished sun. He rationed his sandwiches carefully. He prayed in his strange way, which was more like a sort of querying. At least now, after all these years, he had a sense of why he'd been spared. It was some consolation.

He fell asleep thinking of his sister, Sarah. Even with his eyes closed he knew where he was on the earth, could imagine his exact position as his internal compass swung about to orient him home.

2

A
fter several days, the country became more familiar. Quinn began to recognise features in the landscape: a cluster of rocks that resembled a family of pigs snuffling in the scrub; the tree where Bill Clayton hanged himself in '05 after his wife ran off with the Salvation Army drummer; the mullock heaps of abandoned gold mines. He came across gullies carved out by mining, abandoned shafts, the rusted remains of machinery half sunk in the red soil.

Fifty years earlier these hills were full of gold and the town of Flint had swarmed with hungry men and their hungrier families, but the boom was fleeting and left in its wake a landscape riven and tortured, littered with the ruins of rock stampers and wooden scaffolds that had been erected over shafts. All that remained was the large Sparrowhawk Mine, but the mountains and gullies throughout the area were encrusted with the wrecks of small settlements where families had gathered according to their countries of origin: the Welsh Village, Irish Town, Chinese Flat. The ground was hard and rocky. Scottish thistle bloomed everywhere. Even the native trees looked to have grown not from this country but, rather, to have been thrust—unwilling, straining skyward—into the soil from which they now attempted to writhe free.

Quinn had wandered these hills as a boy, shooting birds and rabbits, often with Sarah tramping behind him, rebuking him for wayward shots. They had found nuggets of gold, which they'd hoarded and planned to sell when they were older so they might travel to strange countries and purchase exotic animals and jewels.
Treasure
, Sarah called the nuggets as she solemnly placed each of them in a cigar box, alongside several buttons she deemed precious, a brooch, rare feathers and a postage stamp she had found one day in Orchard Street. Sarah often carried one of these tokens as a kind of lucky charm and would take it out to inspect during the day. Not that it helped; Quinn knew for a fact she had a lucky red button sewn to her dress on the day she died.

Now, for minutes at a time, pausing in a gully or beneath a tree, Quinn was suspended in the cooling amber of memory. It was a queasy brew of longing and regret. He was amazed at how little things had changed in the ten years he had been away. The world looked the same, but it had been thrown off course forever by Sarah's murder. He steadied himself against a tree and was afraid. Like a different sort of Eden, the air here quivered and shimmered as if struggling to contain the variety of life it was obliged to sustain. It was easy to imagine the beginning of time here, but also, perhaps, its end.

He sat on a stump in the shade and unbuttoned his tunic. The ground was hard and hot, but it made a pleasant change from the mud of France where a man struggled sometimes to take a single step. He picked burrs of thistle from his socks and the hems of his trousers. He thumped the side of his head in an attempt to dislodge the thickness that had accumulated there and which rendered the world remote, less decipherable than ever. He drank from his water flask and glanced up, startled to see a man standing ten feet away carrying a rifle. Quinn thought of his revolver but realised it was impossible to retrieve quickly.

The man grinned, raised a hand in greeting and crunched through the leaf litter towards him. Hanging about his waist was a gruesome belt of bloodied, ragged dead rabbits.

“G'day,” he said.

Quinn was too startled to speak. Water drooled from his chin. He thought about fleeing. Standing, he recognised the chap as the good-natured idiot Edward Fitch, infamous in these parts for asking endless questions, and for his precise recall of the date of everything that happened in Flint and the weather that accompanied it. Quinn swore under his breath.

Edward approached. He was stocky, eager, a famished boar of a man. He looked Quinn up and down, licked his lips and muttered something. Quinn cupped a hand to his ear to indicate he hadn't heard properly. His partial deafness required him to recalibrate his limited hearing to each new person—according to the individual's manner and volume of speech—in order to understand them.

“I said: ‘You been at the war?'”

“Yes.”

“Looks like you really copped it,” Edward said, indicating on his own grubby jaw the scarred portion of Quinn's face.

Quinn blushed. He knew the scar was hard to ignore. It resembled a slur of porridge. “Yes.”

Edward shook his head. “Not as bad as some I seen, though. Some of them are bloody awful. Jack Williams got it real bad. Nice uniform you got on. How's it going? Kill some Boche?”

“The war is over.”

Edward tucked his chin into his chest to ponder this information. It occurred to Quinn the dolt had not recognised him. He jammed his hat on his head and bent to gather his things. He might still be able to get away.

“Where are you going?”

Quinn straightened. “I'm … looking for work.”

“You escaping the plague?”

“The plague?”

“The Black Death.”

Quinn had heard this rumour before. He shook his head. “It's not the bubonic plague. It's influenza. Pneumonic influenza, they call it.”

Edward wiped a hand across his mouth, then held up two fingers. “Ginny Reynolds died in two days. Up and died. And she was healthy as a horse. They call it the flu but everyone knows it's something else. Something worse. Mr. McMahon, too. Blood came out his eyes. Flu don't do that, mate.” Edward hitched his belt and the mass of flies ballooned into the air before resettling over the rabbit carcasses. With a crucifix aglitter around his neck, sweat-stained hat, filthy vest and knife wedged into his belt, he resembled a medieval anchorite.

Quinn took up his kitbag. “Have faith,” he said in an unconvincing voice. “God will take care of us.”

“God?” Fitch mocked. “Not sure about
him
.”

Quinn scowled. He recalled what some townsfolk had said about Edward Fitch when he was a boy: that his mother was an unbeliever, that she had brought Edward's malformed nature on her own head by attempting to rid herself of him before he was even born.

“You shouldn't say such a thing,” Quinn warned.

“They reckon down at Sully's that God don't exist. That he's dead, believe it or not, what with the war and everything.”

“And what would they know?”

Edward Fitch smirked. Obviously, he had gotten the reaction he desired all along.

“What about that cross around your neck?” Quinn asked.

“That's nothing. Found it.”

“Then why do you wear it?”

Edward gave him a look of sullen reproach. “I like it.”

“Anyway,” Quinn said shaking his head, hoping to make clear his disapproval, “I have to keep moving. Goodbye. Good luck to you.”

“You want to buy a rabbit before you go on?”

“I have no money.”

Edward untied one of the bloody creatures and held it out to him. In addition to the smell of freshly killed rabbits, he reeked of souring milk. “Don't matter. Take it. A present.”

Quinn hesitated. His sandwiches had almost run out; some meat would indeed be wonderful. His mouth actually watered at the thought of it. “Thanks.” He took the limp creature.

“That's alright, mate.” Edward licked his lips, inspected him. “I didn't recognise you at first. You changed a lot. And not only cos of that thing on your mouth.”

Quinn's tongue turned to wadding. He should never have engaged in conversation with this fool. He should have taken his leave immediately. And now it was too late. He thought again of his revolver.

“Didn't think you'd show your face around here again, Quinn Walker,” Edward went on without apparent malice, nodding sagely as he riffled through the facts stored away in his head. “Not after what happened.” A pause. “July 5th, 1909. Raining real hard. A Saturday—no wait —Sunday. A Sunday it was.”