A Kindness Cup (6 page)

‘He's got pneumonia,' he said to the two black men with him. ‘You can't shift him. He'll die.'

They
stared blank.

‘My God!' Lunt cried, raising his voice. ‘Devil disease. In here.' He struck where he imagined his heart might be. He coughed for them. He gasped for air along with the man on the bed of leaves. ‘Two days. Three. Unless I nurse him. Bring him up to the house.'

They still stared. But Bunyah was beginning to frown.

‘You heard me? You bright boy, Koha? You love this old man. You want him living long time?'

Koha nodded.

‘You bring him to the house then, quick smart.'

He backed out of the rough shelter which was made as much with love as with boughs and straightened up.

The old man groaned once more. ‘You bring him,' he repeated, and did not look at the other two again.

It had taken him years to learn what the law had never learnt, that the best boomerang to use against them was the threat of silence.

Two of the younger men carried him there on a stretcher of stringybark. Half an hour had gone by before they capitulated to the threat of Lunt's sturdy back riding away without another word.

Lunt put the old man in his own bed, looking down at the black face against the torn white pillow. A bad anthropological joke. The tribesmen shuffled and were reluctant to go.

‘Off now,' Lunt commanded as gently as he could. ‘Off quick time. Look after your women.'

Koha bent to lay his head against that of the sick man.

‘I'll take care of him,' Lunt reassured, ‘as if he were my own father.'

Though there wasn't much he could do, he thought, as
he watched the men, pigeon-toed and splay-footed, walk back through dust in the direction of the camp.

He sponged the old man down and rubbed in some chest embrocation he hadn't used for years. He fed him sips of cooled boiled water with aspirin mashed in it and sat by him and waited for the fever to go down.

At sundown the old man was worse, sitting up in the bed with his eyes turned in, the whites showing. Cries and moans of the fever-spirit were gabbled out, the congestion in his lungs thickening each sound. Lunt opened a tin of soup and heated it while the sick man babbled wildly. Having drunk it at a gulp he went back to fanning and sponging the dried skin and holding a blanket round the racked shoulders.

There were no smoke-lines by the river that evening, no cobber glow of fire. Somehow the camp had slipped away in the early darkness and as the light turned blue and became star-scarred, he was glad that one thing at least had been secured, even as Tiboobi raved in the crisis.

Near ten he heard the horses go past. They were walking them, but he still heard the soft slurring of dust as they went round by the far paddock, the clink of a bridle, a snort from a horse. The dog stood braced by the veranda steps, his urge to bark stilled by his master's hand on his risen fur.

Not long, Lunt thought. Not long before they're back. He watched the hands on his alarm clock staggering round for ten minutes, fifteen, soothing the old man as he cried out, forcing more water between the thick lips. The frizz of Tiboobi's skull was grey. His heavily ridged hands clawed at blanket and tribe memories of the green coast.

Lunt was praying for him when the horses came back.

The
men came in without ceremony, riding-boots heavy on the veranda boards.

Barney Sweetman's angel face loomed over Lunt where he sat beside the stretcher and five other faces glowed in the darkness beyond the lamp.

‘You bastard,' Sweetman said. ‘You rotten bastard.'

Lunt said nothing. Buckmaster shoved through the door past a fringe of rifles.

‘What's this then?' he demanded, staring at the old man on the stretcher. ‘What the bloody hell is this, eh?'

‘Lower your voices,' Lunt said quietly. ‘The old man's dying.'

‘By Jesus!' Buckmaster cried, whipping himself up for violence. ‘Then I'll help him on his way.'

Suddenly and dreadfully he raised his rifle and blasted through the black man's chest.

Lunt sat there in the pathetic splatter of blood, still holding the old man's bony body against his. His hatred for the men in front of him filled the whole of his throat and banged in his skull.

‘He would have died anyway,' he said. ‘You swine.'

He laid the body back on the bed. The stained sheets took on a brighter hue.

‘Where are they?' Buckmaster asked. His mouth was still trickling the saliva of his excitement. He felt a tightening in his groin. He found himself levelling his rifle at Lunt who smiled now, and the smile was the thorn in the other man's skin.

‘I have nothing to say,' he said simply.

‘You're the law!' screamed Buckmaster. ‘So you are the law! Where the bloody hell have they gone?'

‘I'm not,' Lunt said with finality, ‘saying a bloody word.'

‘Oh, Christ!' Buckmaster whimpered. ‘Do you want a massacre! Let's fix the bastard.'

Sweetman
uttered a Judas ‘Sorry, old man' and the rest of them seized him then. One of them went outside and brought in some saddle ropes and although Lunt fought them back a rifle butt knocked the sense out of him and they lashed him strongly with a lot of unnecessary rope to the dead man and then both of them to the bed. Face to face. Lunt lay with his lips shoved into flesh already cold.

D
ORAHY LIES
on
his narrow hotel bed and thinks of Charlie Lunt. Waiting round to register amid a bunch of old-timers in the lobby, he had stood apart from them when he could. Palsy-walsy, those others, clustering almost recognisable beside the pub's weary potted ferns with quick reminiscence, those tiny sparklers of recalled friendship cultivated for the seven-day stay with ‘Well keep in touch' to keep them going.

How old would he be now? Dorahy wonders, remembering finding him, riding out there at the end of the week with the slaughters at Mandarana still a fresh stain. Afraid to enter because of the stench, and then seeing it, hearing the dead whimper as the dog snarled from the back of the room. A job more than he could stomach, but he had done it. Somehow. The ropes sunk deep in flesh by now, cut and falling away and Lunt dropping off the stretcher onto the floor with the terrible reek of his black companion stuck to his clothes and face.

Lugging him into the buggy, then, and saddling up, the dog as inert on the buggy floor as his master. Glancing back at the sunken face beside the dog's skeletal head and imagining—was it?—that once he heard the word ‘Thanks'.

Young Jenner peers round the door of the bedroom, his face adolescent earnest, and says, ‘Sir, he's getting better. My mother says it's a miracle.'

‘Who did it, boy?' he asks.

'He won't say,'
young Jenner says. ‘Mr Buckmaster says it was the blacks did it.'

‘Desecrate their own?'

‘He says it was a punishment for killing the old man.'

‘And what does Mr Lunt say?'

‘He won't say anything.'

‘What a world!' Dorahy thinks. ‘What a world!'

He crosses to his window and looks out. Town looms out of rose. He marvels at the static quality of buildings he remembers, still there but nursing different memories for other eyes. He walks out to the veranda in front and looks down the road to see the school, extended and gardened, yet with a remembered window through which he had eased his mind while stumbling translation pocked the unreality of tropical summer. He can see the irony of it better now, the folly of discussing Hannibal's passage to power in this scraggy landscape that bore the frightful sores of its own history, scenes Suetonius would have regarded with horror—shattered black flesh, all the more horrible because of the country's negation—none of your soft olive groves and dove-blueness in the hills—heat, dust and the threat of scrub where trees grew like mutations.

Yet
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus
put up alongside the scrabblings and the gropings, the arrowed hearts and linked initials behind the School of Arts, wasn't so different at that. Thinking of the slender boys bedewed with odours and remembering young Jenner in love with the slender ghost of the fat woman he had recognised in the lobby. Where, unable to rest, he feels that he must return. He unpacks his bag and hangs his other suit in the wardrobe. Womb-fluid is all nostalgia, he tells himself, walking back down the stairs, his puritan mouth keeled over towards disapproval.

At the foot of the stairs a man is waiting.

Dorahy looks uncertainly at a face whose features have been
bashed by two decades of living since he last saw it. A name struggles to the surface and he knows who it is. There is nothing to this man now: a cipher once he had been washed up and let die.

‘It is Tom Dorahy?' the lips ask.

‘Yes.'

‘Remember me?'

‘I'm terribly afraid…' He is battling to gain time. The lost shiftiness of the face disturbs him. He finds himself shrinking.

‘Barney Sweetman,' the old man says, confirming what Dorahy knows. ‘There isn't too much the same, but I'd know you.'

Grudgingly Dorahy puts out a hand and has it pumped for a few seconds while Sweetman's down-and-out angel face crawls into his for deliverance.

‘I remember,' Dorahy says at last. ‘Things were different then. Are they any different now, I wonder?'

‘A lot,' the other says, and they both recall the high rock and the court and a certain hot noon. ‘Yes, a lot.' Sweetman pushes his mouth into a smile. ‘I've cut right out of municipal politics altogether now. I'm still State member for this area. Gives me a wider interest. And there's no real retiring age, you know. A man has to do his work. You retire when the electors tell you and not a day before.'

‘And they haven't told you yet?'

‘Still the same old Tom,' Sweetman says, grinning. ‘You haven't changed, mate. No. They haven't sent me out yet.'

‘And Buckmaster?' Dorahy asks. ‘Buckmaster and his now middle-aged bull son?'

‘Buckmaster's still here,' he says. ‘But his boy pulled out of the police and runs a pub on the Palmer. A fine man he's turned out, so it happens.'

‘My God,' Dorahy says. ‘My God!'

Sweetman
places his arm around the thin shoulders for a moment. ‘You've come back, Tom,' he says. ‘What's your reason then? You shouldn't have come back in a spirit of criticism. That's all over now. So long ago no one remembers.'

‘I remember.'

‘You won't forget, you mean. Are growing pains the only things you recall, eh?'

‘Is that how you dismiss it? Growing pains!'

‘Then why have you come back?'

‘In the spirit of curiosity.'

‘I hope that's all,' Sweetman says. ‘I've come along specially to meet you' (‘Forestall,' Dorahy thinks) ‘as part of the old place, to ask you round for a drink tonight before the official welcome next week. You'll be in that, won't you?'

Your lousy vote-catching manner, Dorahy thinks. ‘I'll be there,' he says.

‘Where's Charlie Lunt these days?' he asks.

Sweetman's face closes over. ‘Old Charlie,' he muses. ‘Finally gave up that property of his. It was falling apart. He never did strike enough water.'

‘He lost heart?' Dorahy prompts.

‘You could say that.'

‘He could have said more,' Dorahy whispers. He feels very old suddenly. The girl behind the desk is watching them both. He is incapable of giving her a smile.

‘Where is he then?' he persists.

‘Somewhere up the coast,' Sweetman answers at last. ‘A little mixed business. Better for him. Look after Mr Dorahy,' he says swinging towards the girl behind the desk. Pulling rank. ‘He's one of our more important guests.'

‘Certainly, Sir Barnabas,' she says. It sounds incredibly comic. She sighs too, Dorahy notices, and he thinks, Ah by
next election he'll know what it is to be told. He'll know all right.'

‘Have a bit of a kip, now, Tom.' Sweetman uses a patting action on the other's shoulder. ‘You could do with a bit of a lie-down, eh? And we'll see you tonight about eight. We're still at the old place. Bit bigger, bit smarter, but much the same. You know me. Nothing grand.'

Mr Dorahy has his lie-down.

H
OW MANY
men,
Mr Sheridan asked Lieutenant Buckmaster, are there in your detachment?

Ten.

Ten official members?

The lieutenant squirmed. No.

Then how many?

Four official members only.

And were the men who accompanied you on this third expedition the same ones we were speaking of before, those same ten, official or not?

Lieutenant Buckmaster hesitated. Not all.

Who else, then, was with you on this expedition?

A few of the townsmen.

A few?

A few.

By what authority did they accompany you? I assume they were armed.

I was sent for by Mr Romney.

Directly by Mr Romney?

Lieutenant Buckmaster shuffled something—his feet? his mind?

No. I acted on a letter received by one of the townsmen.

And who was that?

My father.

At the back of the court Mr Dorahy who had been readmitted to give evidence felt his lips in an unbearable twitch of a smile.

Mr
Romney is a member of the Separation League, is he not? asked Mr Sheridan.

Yes.

Then he would know your father well—could be classed as a personal friend perhaps?

I suppose so.

What did you do, pursued Mr Sheridan, when you came to Romney's station?

I went first to the outlying properties and did not find any of the tribe there. Then I went towards the coast and followed it up to Tumbul. Finding no tracks there, I came back across the flats to Kuttabul where I discovered evidence that led us towards the Mandarana scrub. I found the blacks at the water-hole back from Mandarana.