Bereft (24 page)

“The what?”

“You know. Terror incognito. Means unknown.”

He laughed. “It's
terra
—spelt T-E-R-R-A. Means ground. Unknown land.”

She looked at him askance for several seconds before allowing herself a sly smile. She took his hand. “You're funny. Come on.”

She led him about fifteen feet, to the rear of the cave. The rocky ceiling sloped, and they were forced to waddle for the remaining few feet. The light of day didn't seep this far, and the recess was cool and dim. Quinn's head brushed the ceiling. They sat on the cold ground and waited for their eyes to adjust. The girl was beside him, picking at a scab on her bare shin, absorbed in her childish task. Quinn could scarcely believe the truth of her and, as if compelled by an inner force not his own, he reached out one hand across the few feet separating them. She stopped what she was doing and glanced up. She didn't move. She allowed him to caress first one cheek, then the other, to run his fingers through her long hair. He sensed, percolating up within him, the urge to weep.

He withdrew his hand, coughed into his fist. His ankles were aching from kneeling. Then, there, right in front of him, as his eyes acclimatised further to the darkness, he made out a galaxy of painted hands all around them. There were dozens of them spread over the walls and ceiling—not only hands but kangaroos and snakes, all daubed in ochre and black. He laughed with sudden recognition and scanned the hands until he located one proportionate to his own and pressed his palm to the cold rock.

He took his hand away and smiled at Sadie. “But what are we doing up here?”

“We need to find out when the tracker is back, like you said. Especially now Dalton has the tunic. There are magic ways to find out these things, but you have to help me.”

She scrambled from the cave, only to return a minute later with the lamb in tow. She insisted Quinn grab the lamb around its shoulders with one hand cupped beneath its chin. Like a hirsute infant the lamb struggled against his chest, wrenching its rocky head this way and that, bleating.

With a nub of chalk, Sadie drew a circle on the ground around them. “Holding tight?”

Quinn smirked. The whole thing was ridiculous, but he nodded anyway. He would indulge her for the moment. “What happens now?”

With eyes screwed half shut, Sadie mouthed something and plunged her knife into the lamb. She sliced open the creature's belly with a sound not unlike the shredding of a canvas sack. A humid smell of shit and innards filled the cave. Quinn's thighs became warm with blood. He swore. The lamb struggled against him, bucked desperately, until it lurched free and stood a few feet away and stared at them with an expression of startled reproof. Its intestines ploppered to the cave floor, followed by other, purpled innards. The creature collapsed to its front legs then its hind and, after emitting a plaintive ruckle, fell over, stiffened and died. The entire episode only lasted a minute.

Quinn rubbed at his bloodstained trousers. He attempted to stand and banged his head against the low ceiling. He kneeled again. “What in hell are you doing?”

But the girl, herself blood-spattered, was already squatting beside the dead lamb with her back to him. She commenced her divinations, nodding to herself as she separated the innards with her fingers and clucked with recognition or surprise. She raised a finger at him to forestall interruption and, discomfited, Quinn shuffled back into the light of the late afternoon.

He sat on the shelf of rock, scored with odd symbols—perhaps even illegible words—that did not appear to have been done by the same people who did the cave paintings. He noticed objects littering the ground around the cave mouth. There were piles of stones and bones, pieces of string, hair, even a pair of cast-iron soldiers wedged upright between stones with their rifles pointing out across the land. He shook his head. Sadie.

It was getting late. There was a fizz in the gloaming. It was his favourite time, when it was possible to see those things not usually visible in the flattening light of day: whorling clouds of insects; flecks of pollen; feathers gleaming; tiny parachutes of dandelion eddying in the wind. Smoke rose along the horizon from a distant bushfire. How amazing, he thought, to be in the world. To be in
this
world. Where nothing was out of the question, where anything was possible. He felt a curious and liberating exhilaration. Far below him sun glinted on metal, and he imagined if someone were to scour the side of the mountain with a telescope at that very moment, they would not even notice him, a rough beast crouching in the shadows.

Sadie emerged half an hour later and squatted to wipe her hands on the rocks at the cave entrance made moist by a trickle of water. She stared out over the darkening country as if digesting what she had discovered, then sat beside him with her head on his shoulder.

“So,” he said, “what did you find out?”

“Nothing yet. It's not always so simple. The information sometimes comes in unexpected ways.”

“I see.”

“You don't believe in this, do you?”

Quinn shuddered to hear an echo of Mrs. Cranshaw in the girl's words. “We might not have time, that's all.”

“The answer will come. I heard them talking at Sully's yesterday, and they said there was no sign yet of the man who killed his wife. The tracker won't be back for a week, at least.”

Quinn sighed. It was hardly scientific. God only knew how he could persuade her to leave this place. He thought of his dying mother down there in the shadows.

With a bloody finger, Sadie pointed out a smoke-hued mountain range in the distance. “Is France past those mountains? Where you were?”

“Yes. And over the sea, too.”

“The sea?”

“The ocean. Full of water.”

“You mean like a lake?”

“Much bigger than that. Larger than you can even see. I was on a boat for weeks to get there.”

She did not seem convinced but nodded anyway, and squinted out over the plains as if she might spy this mysterious body of water. “Is it nice in France?”

“Nice?”

“Not like here.”

At once Quinn understood. Australia was an in-between place, without order, where trees were forced to grow anywhere they could. Their poor roots clawed the ground. The animals were lumpen, wobbling and slithering. Even the birds didn't sing but, rather, cackled and hooted and laughed like so many lunatic inmates. And overhead, always, that sheer, blade-sharp sky.

“No,” he said. “It's not like here at all.”

“What about Kensington Gardens? Is that a long way?”

He laughed. Sadie knew all sorts of esoteric details about the world, but she could be ignorant of basic facts. “It's in London. That's quite far. Miles.”

“As far away as France?”

“Yes. Why do you want to know?”

“I thought me and Thomas would go there when he gets back. Mrs. Babcock reads to her children about it. I even dream about it. There is a lake there. Fairies as small as your thumb, a world under the water. Imagine that. They have parties where all the creatures are invited, all the squirrels and birds and so forth, rabbits and crickets.” She seemed to feast on this memory. “I have prayed that we will get there.”

Quinn had indeed spied her at night on her knees with her slender hands steepled against her bony chest, a pale and earnest mantis in the moonlight.

“You could come with us to Kensington Gardens,” she said. “With me and Thomas. The three of us. You'd like Thomas, everyone likes Thomas. He's very funny.”

Clouds of insects swarmed in the hot and trembling light of dusk. She draped an arm around his shoulders. A dry wind whipped her damp hair about and at that moment she resembled a girl suspended underwater, patiently holding her breath with waterweed plastered across her face.

Darkness flooded the land. Quinn gathered wood and built a fire inside the cave. With Sadie's knife they butchered the lamb and cooked pieces over the fire. She told him that he needed to eat as much of the lamb as he could, that it would help them find out the date of the tracker's return. He didn't believe her, but he was hungry and happy enough to gorge himself on the charred meat. Lying on their backs on the cave's undulating floor, they watched the firelight animate the ancient Aboriginal hands and animals, and Quinn had the sense that, without his having noticed it, a grain of happiness had lodged by his heart.

In the middle of the night, he heard Fletcher Wakefield's clotted breath in the cot alongside him. He, too, had been gassed at Pozières. A shaft of sulphurous light fell through the window onto his own bed. The windowpane glimmered with rain. The dormitory smelled of carbolic. There were ten other soldiers around him in the near-dark and he was comforted by their slumbering presence. They were good men, mostly. Those not ruined by it were made decent by war. To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss. But now they had lived through much of the war, many, like Quinn, lay awake at night, untethered from the fear that had sustained them for so long. At the other end of the room a cigarette tip flared and faded, flared and faded.

He thought about the girl and, after half an hour of indecision, he rolled onto his side. “Fletcher,” he hissed. “
Fletcher.
”

Fletcher woke but was clearly unhappy about it. His thin pillow tumbled to the floor. “What?”

“We should go back.”

“What? Where? Jesus, Meek. What are you talking about?”

“That young girl.”

“
What
girl?”

“The Cranshaw girl.”

“Oh, God.” Groggy, Fletcher propped himself up on one elbow. “Margaret, you mean? Did she … Did she say something to you?”

Someone
sshhed
them from the darkness.

“What did she say?”

Quinn rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

“Well. What happened? Quinn? Jesus, you can't wake me up like that then clam up … .”

He wanted to tell Fletcher about the note, suggest they go back and take Margaret away from the grasping Mrs. Cranshaw, that to do so would be a decent act with which to arm themselves against the century's dark tides. They might need it, considering all the men they had probably killed with their bullets and grenades. But instead he ignored Fletcher's entreaties, and Fletcher rolled over, disgusted, and fell silent. After all, how to explain such a thing? And Quinn lay there until a watery English dawn leaked into the room.

He woke abruptly from his dream. His skin was slick with moisture, and he cast about for something with which to orient himself. The stink of viscera filled his nostrils; a pebble pressed into his cheek. There. Fire embers, like a burning town seen from a vast distance. He coughed. Pain gripped his innards. Then someone was beside him. Sadie. She nestled against him and whispered reassuring words. Her body was without guile, mere breath and bones, the branches of her limbs. There was a nub at her wrist where the joint underneath pressed against her skin and, further along her arm, down like that of a peach.

They stayed unmoving, folded birdlike about each other as they had on many nights, listening to the traffic of the stars and the shift of the earth. The night was complete, would not become any darker. He wondered what would become of them, not only tonight or in the next few days but over the months and years to come.

She wriggled tighter against him. “You won't let them take me away, will you? You'll wait until Thomas comes back for me?”

The embers of their fire wheezed. “Yes. Of course I'll stay. I won't let them find you.”

“You'll protect me? Do you promise?”

“I cross my heart.”

He rebuilt the fire, and they spent the rest of the night huddled against the cold. In the morning, they constructed a bier of branches to which they tied the eviscerated lamb, and dragged it back down the mountain to their shack.

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