Bereft (17 page)

After several nights of this, she sidled deeper into the room, inch by inch, until she was so close Quinn could smell the tang of her unwashed skin. One morning, he woke to discover her folded into the curl of his body, her sweaty hair tickling his throat, her heartbeat hard and fast against his own. Without discussion, this became the way they slept every night.

The summer days droned on. They settled into a pantomime of domesticity: tidying the shack; gossiping about Flint residents; sharing meals; dozing through the long afternoons, one of her thin arms flung across his chest. Day and night, the opiate tide of heat moved through the wreck of the ramshackle cottage.

The cross Sadie had demanded Quinn carve into his chest started to heal over, but there began to appear all over his body—particularly about his torso and arms—other wounds, a barbed-wire galaxy of dark planets and stars, of tiny moons adrift over his pale skin. Some were deep and painful, others mere nicks. Of making them himself he had no memory. Most mornings he would wake to discover one or two more. Perhaps Sadie did it as he slept. Who knew what she was capable of? If she noticed them when they bathed or slept, she didn't mention it. He pored over them in the morning, trying to determine which were new. He kept his shirt sleeves rolled down when he visited his mother but was aware at all times of their minute keening.

They swam sometimes in a nearby creek, washed their clothes, and dried them on rocks or flung across branches. Quinn's beard itched as it grew. At night, when the house and surrounding bush were still, he heard the whiskers growing through his cheeks with a sound like that of countless nails being prised from wood. Inspecting himself in a shard of mirror he was surprised to detect in his bristles spatters of grey, as if the beard were that of an older man grafted over his more youthful face. Absently he stroked this new feature, finding in the action a curious pleasure.

Sometimes Sadie vanished for hours, whereupon he would pace around the ruined house or sit marooned with his back to a crumbling wall and listen, just listen, trying to pick through the bird calls and rustling leaves, straining to hear a sign of her return. On several occasions he attempted to follow her but was never able to keep up, and each time she disappeared he feared she'd left for good. He fretted over the things that might happen and became certain with every passing hour that disaster had befallen her: she had slipped into a mine shaft, been caught by his uncle, been bitten by a snake.

But always, regardless of how stonily he waited, she would appear from nowhere, approaching with no audible footfall and no explanation as to her former whereabouts. He was surprised at the desperation he felt at her absence. Over the years he had inured himself to solitude and often found it preferable to be alone. He had become a man who kept himself aloof, but now this. This strange longing.

Sadie didn't talk much or, rather, she didn't reveal much more about herself. If Quinn asked about her parents, she shrugged and made indeterminate noises of regret. If he continued she became sullen, then angry, causing Quinn to feel guilty for pressing her so. He shuddered to imagine all the children of the world left defenceless, abandoned by war or disease to fend for themselves. He pictured a crusading army of them storming over the land with Sarah at their head, seeking retribution from those who had failed them.

He saw her sometimes when he was out collecting wood or returning from visiting his mother. She would be kneeling in the bracken apparently engaged in conversation with an insect or lizard he couldn't see. Once he saw her standing with her entire body pressed to the trunk of a paperbark tree, in communion with its peeling surface. He watched her from ten feet away until she turned to him as if she had known of his presence all along, blinked, ran a hand through her greasy hair and said, “This tree says it will rain tonight. The ants say the same thing. They know everything, of course. They talk with everyone here. You see how they stop and chat with each other?”

Rain seemed unlikely: overhead the sky was blue and cloudless. That night they ate boiled potatoes and bread smeared with honey. The shack was lit by numerous candles and a gas lamp she had picked up somewhere.

Later, he heard the dark rumble of thunder, followed by the spatter, only a purr at first but increasing in clamour like an applauding audience rising to its feet, of rain. He went outside and onto his outstretched palm fell large, sluggish drops. A surge of comfort and fear overwhelmed him as he sensed Sadie behind him in the shack watching him. Rain, just as she'd said. Rain.

15

T
he air in his mother's room was warm, narcotic. As usual, she was asleep. Her profile was queenly, her neck marmoreal. The curtains were drawn against the summer sun.

He thought about how, in France during the war, he was billeted with several other Australian soldiers at a farmhouse in a village that was home to about a hundred families. The village had cobbled streets and houses with thatched roofs, a tatty square of yellow sand in which old men gathered to smoke in the afternoon. There was also a church rumoured to contain, among other things, the immaculately preserved body of a shepherdess beheaded hundreds of years earlier for spurning the advances of a scoundrel, but who had carried her severed head several miles before dropping dead. The village might have been just as it was hundreds of years ago were it not for the persistent thump of artillery from the Front twenty miles away.

An elderly couple managed the farm. Their eleven-year-old grandson Philippe lived with them: Philippe's father was away fighting, and his mother was in Paris for reasons that were never clear. The boy would linger in the doorway as the soldiers played cards at night. A fellow called Bill Spark named him The Watcher. “Look out, boys,” he would say with a wink. “The Watcher's 'ere. Better mind your
langwidge
now.”

It was late winter, 1918. The air swirled with news and rumours: the Germans had captured one hundred thousand men on the Eastern Front; the British were advancing on the Jerusalem–Nablus Road; hundreds were lost when a cruiser was sunk off the Irish coast; Billy Hughes had typhoid. Quinn's own battalion was down from one thousand men to around three hundred. He had expected some atonement from his war experience, but it had offered nothing of the sort. Men died and were replaced by others. They huddled underground in trenches, in hollows, in ruins, many of them so muddied and grey about the gills they might have been fashioned from the earth itself. By this stage they didn't fear death so much as they feared living this way forever. War, he had discovered, blighted every sense a man possessed: if he closed his eyes to the sight of ruined trees and bloodied men, he still heard guns and screaming; if he covered his ears he still felt the jolting earth; the smell of gas lined his nostrils; everything he touched was wet or bloody. Even when asleep, he dreamed of flickering explosions of light, of torn clothing, of grunting laughter. And on and on it went.

And his sister was still dead.

One cold afternoon, squatting with his back to one of the barn's stone walls, Quinn became aware the boy was watching him and, in time, Philippe tore over to him through a gaggle of geese. He had blue eyes and freckles across his nose. Quinn was fond of the boy. He wanted to assure him his mother and father would be fine and that the war would soon be over, but he didn't know the language and, besides, he might well be wrong. False assurances were certainly more harmful than none at all.

Philippe sized him up and started talking. “You want,” he said in his fractured English, “you come with me. I show you … something.”

Quinn shook his head. He wanted to stay where he was, with his back against a wall that had probably been standing for three hundred years. But the boy was insistent. He tugged at Quinn's sleeve and, eventually, he relented.

The village smelled of manure and of bread. They passed an old woman dressed in black who scowled at them. They arrived at a large, wooden door. Philippe knocked and implored whoever was on the other side to open up. After a few minutes, there was the sound of a bolt sliding back and they slipped through. A man ushered them into a stone portico that led to a courtyard. Quinn could now see the man was wearing a cassock: a priest, then. Quinn was becoming impatient. He was cold and hungry. He blew into his cupped hands and stamped his feet.

They stepped into a stable that was empty save for straw scattered over the ground. Philippe and the priest crossed to the far corner where they kneeled to sweep a space on the floor with their hands. They ran their fingers along the seam of what resembled a cellar door, which they hauled open by means of a brass ring. The priest was displeased, but lit a candle and descended grumbling into the cellar. Philippe indicated that Quinn should follow.

He paused. How was he to know these Catholics weren't intending to murder him? He had heard rumours of such traitors. Had anyone seen him leave with the boy? He jammed his hands under his armpits and stared back to the trapezoid of sunlight aslant in the courtyard. But when Philippe urged him on, Quinn climbed down the wooden stairs.

The cellar was dank but bloomed with an incongruous tropical smell, like that of overripe fruit. The priest busied himself lighting extra candles and drew back a curtain before turning to Quinn with shy pride.

Quinn gasped. Lying on a low table was a girl dressed in white. In the uncertain light the table was indistinguishable from the gloom, and this gave her the appearance of hovering unsupported at waist height. On the wall above was pinned a card of the Virgin Mary and on a nearby shelf was an assortment of crosses, unlit candles, silver cups and trays. Philippe smiled and nodded. “Saint Solange,” he was saying. “
C'est
Saint Solange
.”

The saint was young, with dark and brittle hair. Her hands, resting on her stomach, were thin and desiccated, more like claws, with fingernails the colour of port. A pink ribbon was tied around her neck, and attached to it by a tiny clasp was a silver cross partially hidden behind her high collar. Her dress was torn here and there, but most touching of all were the brown socks that covered her tiny feet.

Quinn was overcome. His throat quivered and burned. He clamped a hand across his mouth not only to prevent the escape of sobs that gurgled up from within, but to halt the very intake of breath. His eyes streamed with tears. The unmistakable dark, wet sounds of grief oozed through his fingers.

If a single image were to remain from Quinn's time at war it would be of this saint who had been dead for hundreds of years but whose face—cracked and sallow as it was—lent her the look of mere sleep, as if she might open her eyes at any moment, turn to him and smile, as his mother now did in her airless room.

“Ah. My long-lost boy.” She fumbled for the glass of water on her bedside table. When she had drunk, she reached out to him, as was her habit. Around her on the bed were half-a-dozen books, some splayed open to reveal blocks of type. “Do you remember Ulysses? How during his adventures some of his men were given a plant to eat that made them forget all thoughts of home—of the past—and wish to remain exactly where they were? On an island, I think.”

Quinn did not remember, but nodded nonetheless. His mother was delirious.

“Lotus plant,” she went on. “Of course Ulysses also claimed to have had an encounter with a mob of Cyclops, so I am unsure how much we should believe his stories, you know.”

Quinn flicked through the pages of a book he had picked up. He sat on the edge of the bed. “Should I read you something?”

But she had descended into the labyrinth of her memory. “I remember how Sarah loved to play that game—what was it?—that one with the sheep bones. Knuckles! Balancing them on the back of her hand. She played it for hours, didn't she? A sound through the house like rodents. That is what I remember of her, one of the things I remember about her. The damn things are probably still in her room. In that box, perhaps.”

Sarah had often nagged him to play that game with her and he had done so countless times—under the shade of a eucalypt, on the veranda when it rained, even in the dirt beneath the house when it was hot. The game remained a constant passion among so many passing fancies; she even had a particular set of the bones, each marked with a crude
SW
in blue ink that wore off and had to be re-lettered every few weeks.

They sat in silence for several minutes. The clock ticked.

“You have new clothes?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Where did you get them?”

Quinn fidgeted. He hated lying to his mother but told her he bought them.

“Not here, I trust.”

“No. In Sydney.”

His mother seemed satisfied. “Quinn, I was thinking. You should go away. Don't stay here. Go to Queensland where you will be safe. Stay with your brother.” She rummaged under the bedclothes and produced a crumpled envelope that she pressed to him. “Here. It has his address on the back. Take it.”