Tourmaline (4 page)

We laid our charge on a sea-grass mat while Deborah fetched sheets and made the bed. Then, very gently, we stripped him of boots and socks, and slit up the sleeves and back of his shirt to avoid touching his forearms with the cloth. Over his left breast there was a hollow scar, and another on his back, opposite. We lifted him on to the bed and supported his head with pillows, and then Mary came with cloths and a bowl of reddish Tourmaline water, and damped the cloths and draped them on his forehead. I bear witness that in all things she behaved according to the directions of
Everything A Lady Should Know
, the property of Tom’s grandmother.

But Rock said that was not enough, and taking the bowl from Mary he swabbed the man’s body, and pulled the sheet over him and soaked that too. And then he said we must pull the bed out from the wall, and stand about and fan him, as that would be easier work than hewing a grave up on the hill there. He spoke as if only he appreciated the tremendous urgency of saving our patient for Tourmaline: but I think all of us felt this urgency, and a certain irritation with the others.

So we stood by the bedside. A strange sight we must have been, fanning with bits of paper and cardboard and whatever else came to hand, earnest, and almost silent. The two women were there, and Rock and I, and Byrne, who seemed quite sober now and very grave. Jack Speed and Horse Carson came and went throughout the afternoon. Horse dipped into our subject’s trouser pockets for a name or some other clue, but there was nothing of that sort; only a pocket-knife, a handkerchief, a box of matches and a number of coins. ‘He wasn’t broke,’ said Horse; adding: ‘He’s wet his pants, poor bugger.’

I remember the quiet of that afternoon, the forlorn crowing of Mary’s one rooster in the yard outside, the hiss of wind through stiff leaves, the occasional useless clank of the Springs’ windmill probing the almost dry bore. And above all the breathing of the man on the bed, who held on, who held so stubbornly on, defying the sun itself.

At times Mary took his temperature. We declared at first that the old thermometer lied, when it said a hundred and seven; but Rock, who seemed to know something about these things, said he trusted it. In all the afternoon there was little change; a degree or two at the most. Our wrists ached with fanning, our legs with standing. After sunset, Mary said there was no point in retaining so many nurses. She and Tom would care for their new protégé, she seemed to suggest; and the rest of us, I think, rather resented this hint of possessiveness. He belonged to Tourmaline, after all.

‘I’ll stay too,’ Deborah said. And Mary nodded, looking pleased.

Byrne said, rather awkwardly: ‘I’ll keep night watch.’

‘You, Byrnie,’ Mary said. ‘You’ll be dead drunk by ten o’clock.’

He actually flushed, and muttered: ‘Not tonight.’

‘We’ll get chairs, Deborah,’ Mary said. So we knew then that we were dismissed.

We went out into the street, where Rock soon left us. The sky was of that turquoise, verging on green, that comes between sunset and darkness, and had one star in it. The land was lumpy and obscure. Byrne had picked up his guitar from Tom’s counter. He sat down on the war memorial, strumming a little, moodily.

I stood near him, looking down, observing the thick black hair, the gaunt hollow of his cheek as he bent over the guitar, the one satanic eyebrow that was in my line of vision. In that faint light he looked melancholy and even distinguished. One could not see the ruined skin. Some adolescent complaint had robbed him of whatever beauty he might have had, leaving his face pitted with craters, like a dead dark moon.

He struck me as being intolerably sad. I said to him: ‘I think this boy will live, Byrnie. Rocky thinks so, and he seems to know.’

He thumbed a chord or two, and said: ‘Good old Rocky,’ absently.

‘Tourmaline seems to have taken charge of him. When he wakes up he’s going to feel he’s not his own property any more.’

‘He mightn’t want to be his own property,’ Byrne said. ‘Why would he?’

I was surprised, and said: ‘Only a weak-willed man——’

‘Ah, hell,’ he suddenly shouted, striking loud discords. ‘All right, I was meant to be someone’s dog.’ And he went on to play some ballad, very loud and twanging, with his face turned away. I had hurt him, somehow.

So I said: ‘Good night, Byrnie,’ and left him, and went up the road towards my gaol. Towards my tower, silhouetted dark and square against the green western sky, and the black arms of my stricken tree, and the single soft wattle-ball of the evening star, which does not, alas, belong to me.

But his voice followed me far, lamenting.

I pushed open my gate. I paused in my barren garden, beside the dead pepper tree.

I lit the hurricane lantern on the bench by the door, and entered my dark habitation.

Byrne, like most of Tourmaline, did a bit of fossicking to keep himself in liquor. But since he was lazy and unlucky, he also relied very often on the charity of his cousin Kestrel, for whom he did odd jobs round the hotel. Depending on his activities and his state of sobriety he had two homes: one a single-roomed miner’s hut of dry stone on the hill behind the church, the other a small back room of the hotel containing only a bed, on which he had many times been dumped, like a bag of wheat, by sympathetic but exasperated drinking-mates. On one celebrated occasion Kestrel and Horse Carson had succeeded in landing him on it by throwing him through the air from the doorway. He claimed to remember nothing of this, and to disbelieve it.

After I left him he did not start drinking again, but went to this room and lay down on the bed and messed about with his guitar. He was very thoughtful. Presently Kestrel stuck his head through the door, and said: ‘Where’s that bloody Deborah?’ Byrne said that she was nursing the new bloke. ‘Go and get her,’ Kestrel said. ‘I want to eat tonight.’ But Byrne got up from the bed and said he would hash up a bit of tucker. He was very obliging.

In the course of the meal, which Kestrel ate between trips to the bar, Kestrel said that the bloke was sure to die and that Deborah might as well come home. Byrne said nothing. His cousin added that Byrne ate like an old dog, and that there was no necessity for it, as at least one part of his body, his teeth, was in fair condition. He considered, moreover, that if Byrne ate more and drank less he would be healthier and less of a drain on the pub’s resources. Byrne concentrated on eating less obtrusively, and seemed to contemplate Kestrel’s advice; which was odd, as it was not the first time he had heard it. He then stated that he was ready to shoot himself at any time, if Kestrel thought that was the best thing for him. Kestrel said: ‘You corny bastard,’ and went back to the bar.

Byrne washed up, taking care to keep as pure as possible the red water in the basin, which had still several days service to do. Then he returned to his bed, and went to sleep, eventually, still holding his guitar.

At eleven he woke again, and found Kestrel standing in the room with a lamp in his hand, looking blacker and more bitter than ever. Kestrel said: ‘Deborah’s still over there.’

‘Watching the bloke,’ Byrne said, squinting at the light.

‘Go and get her for me, will you?’

Byrne rolled over, yawning. ‘She wouldn’t listen to me.’

‘I’m not going,’ Kestrel said. ‘Not to start an argument with old Mary. Do me a favour.’

Byrne sat up and rubbed his eyes. When he thought about it, he seemed to like the idea. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll take over from her.’ He pulled on his boots (Deborah was trying to domesticate him) and followed Kestrel through the hotel to the front door; through which the road showed all pale and silver-rose in the moonlight, and the Springs’ white store gleamed like a tomb. There was no light there, but the sick man’s room faced the yard in any case.

He crossed the road, his footprints making great pits of shadow in the soft dust, and walked round to the back of the store. A pale-yellow glow came from the sick-room, where Deborah sat in a cane chair by the bed, the lamp beside her, reading some aged magazine. I suppose it was the property of Tom’s grandmother. He called to her from the window, and she rose and came to him.

‘Kes wants you,’ he said.

‘Why?’ she whispered back. And knowing him, I imagine that he blushed.

‘I’ll watch the bloke,’ he said.

‘You’ll go to sleep.’

‘I’ve slept already,’ he told her. ‘I’m sober, Deb. Honest.’ He was very grave.

I can see her standing there, tall and slender in her blue dress, and glimmering a little, golden, in the lamplight. She loved Kestrel, and probably feared him too; but she also loved Mary, and had made her a promise. So she stood hesitating.

But Byrne already had one long thin blue denim leg over the window-sill, and had solved her problem to his own satisfaction. ‘I’m sober,’ he swore again. ‘Go home, Deb. You haven’t slept yet. Kes is waiting up for you.’ And as she still hesitated, he picked her up, rather timorously, and lifted her through the window. There she stood, in the moonlight, thrust out; and the two blue moons reflected in her deep eyes gave her a slightly wild and captive look.

‘Oh, all right,’ she said at last. ‘I suppose I have to. You won’t sleep, Byrnie?’

‘I won’t sleep,’ he promised. Then he turned away to look at the man on the bed, and forgot about her; so she paused no longer, but went out in the moonlight across the road, and through the lighted doorway of the hotel, where Kestrel seized her and enveloped her, like an octopus.

Byrne hung over the man on the bed, whose face and neck and arms had been anointed by Mary with a mixture of baking soda and Vaseline, till he resembled a dancer painted for corroboree. He put his hand on the bedaubed forehead. It was cooler, not so dry as it had been in the afternoon, and the breathing was now less painful. He dampened the cloths around the man’s head, and neck, and sprinkled the sheet again, and sat down with the magazine to fan him and to watch. And he did watch, it seems, all night, he couldn’t take his eyes from the patient; who lay all this time exactly as we had placed him on the bed seven hours before, and stubbornly breathed on through his blubber-lips, oblivious.

Towards sunrise, when Byrne had blown the lamp out, and the walls and the sheets and the white blotches on the man’s face were washed blue with the pre-dawn light, he began to stir and moan. Byrne leaned over him, and saw that he seemed to be trying to raise the swollen lids of his eyes (they too were plastered with Mary’s preparation), and was even showing a little of the iris, of indistinguishable colour. Byrne rested his hand on the sufferer’s hot chest, and placed his mouth close against him. ‘Who are you?’ he whispered.

The man moved his head, restlessly, and groaned. Suddenly he whispered, in a weak childish voice, what sounded like: ‘Up to you.’

‘What’s your name?’ Byrne asked. ‘Your name, mate. Your name.’

After that the man on the bed was silent for a long time, and Byrne drew back. But then he began again, moving his head on the pillow, and moaning, and the feeble voice began to break into words, groups of words separated by gasping silences. ‘Up to you,’ he said. And then: ‘To you, now…Don’t want…can’t take…not me to decide.’ And later, after a long pause: ‘Ah, piker! Oh God!’ When that was said, his eyes closed again.

Byrne filled a glass from a jug of water on the table, lifted the man a little from the pillows and held it to his lips. For about a minute they sat there. Then the patient began to drink, sobbing and slobbering in his eagerness, and swallowed a second glassful after that, of our vile Tourmaline water, before Byrne laid him down. He lay still then, panting.

‘You’re no piker, son,’ Byrne said to him. ‘What’s your name?’

But the man on the bed did not speak again, and seemed to have fallen into a profound sleep. So Byrne desisted. He sat back in his chair and watched the dawn outside revive the delicate colour of red earth and grey-green leaves and grey myall-stems. The lone rooster flapped and crowed. The black cat leaped on to the window-sill and sat there, staring. At six o’clock Mary came in in her nightgown and said: ‘Byrnie!’ He grinned at her, diffident. Mary told me she had never seen him so pleased with himself.

It was about half-past ten when I came again, to inquire after the patient. Mary had been in the kitchen, and followed me into the little room where he lay, guarded once more by Deborah from her rickety chair. He had been anointed a second time with Mary’s concoction, more thickly, and now looked less like a dancer than a clown. I asked whether he had been conscious.

‘He spoke to Byrnie,’ Mary said. ‘Or raved. But he hasn’t been conscious, no.’

‘He’s much better, though,’ Deborah said. ‘His skin’s damp.’ And she touched his pathetic white-washed forehead, very lightly, as if touching him meant something, and looked at us.

I suppose no one had spoken in that room for an hour or two: that may explain it. At any rate, we were suddenly startled by a very tired, but otherwise normal and even pleasant male voice, which said, from behind Deborah’s leaning body: ‘Am I blind?’

Deborah moved back. There he lay, just as before. But he had spoken, evidently.

It was slightly uncanny. At length, as neither woman had answered, I moved to the foot of the bed, and looked up the length of him to his poor tragi-comic face, and asked: ‘Are you awake?’

‘Awake,’ he said, his speech slurred a little by his great cumbersome lips, and sounding very weary and hesitant. But he went on, moving his head uneasily. ‘Can’t see, though. Eyes shut.’

‘You’ve been badly burnt,’ I told him. ‘Your eyelids have swelled. But I think you can open them, if you try.’ I hated the cold commonsense of my voice, even while I was speaking.

He took me at my word, however, screwing up his pale mask with the effort, and giving himself a certain amount of pain, it appeared. And he did succeed. Suddenly the heavy lids were halfway open, and he was looking towards me.