Bereft (5 page)

On his haunches, keeping as low as possible to the ground, he ran his trembling hands around the edges of the mask. He pressed it down into the collar of his tunic, against the tender skin at his throat, his head now a vessel atop his thin frame, sealed off from the world, soundless, in a climate of its very own. Only then did he realise. Bloody hell.

3

T
he next day, Quinn left the cool shade of the pines. He scrambled through bracken and along dry gullies, beating his way with a stick, gathering about the exposed parts of his body scratches and cuts from passing branches. It was familiar countryside and yet it felt strange, as if he were travelling across a landscape from a much-read book.

Careful to stay hidden, he squatted in the scrub beyond the perimeter of his father's property. He knew he would be camouflaged perfectly well if he remained stationary. It was hotter down here out of any cooling breezes. Unseen insects bit his ankles and forearms. The house appeared unchanged, built from stone and wood, the very materials of the land on which it sat. A veranda edged by bushes and flowers ran around three sides. Torch lilies and lavender. A limp, yellow flag hung from a makeshift pole jammed into a porch railing. Quarantine. Edward Fitch was right. Someone in the house was infected.

After about twenty minutes, a man appeared from the stable and pulled open its wide doors. He was familiar, but just barely. He moved with awkward-legged steps, as if his feet were made of glass or clay. It was his father, Nathaniel Walker, older, lank hair gone grey, even rangier than Quinn remembered. He shrank deeper into the bushes, and presently his father led a horse from the stable, heaved himself into the saddle and rode away through the guard of cypress trees that lined the short driveway, leaving plumes of dust that took several minutes to settle in his wake.

Quinn remained amid the crackle and hum of the bush. If nothing else, his time at war had taught him to keep still for long periods of time. Flies buzzed about his sweating face. Mesmerised, as if it were constructed from the detritus of an hallucination, he stared at the house, two hundred feet away. It was smaller than he remembered, but things always were. That, or larger. Memory was imprecise, after all, not to be trusted.

When it seemed his father was not returning and there was no one else at home, he crept from the undergrowth and approached the house, scuffing up dust as he went. He paused at the bottom of the steps to run his hand over the bobbing heads of lavender flowers. He broke off a handful of flowers, rolled them between his fingers and held them to his nose. It was one of the few plants, he thought, whose perfume matched its appearance. Musty air wafted from the space beneath the house, bringing with it a flood of memory, the shout of a child at play. In summer he used to crouch with his siblings in the shade there to play hide-and-seek or knuckles. Even now, there was probably hidden somewhere in the dirt a rotted linen bag of sheep bones, along with the names he and William had carved with a knife into the stumps, and the fantastic winged animals Sarah had drawn with her nub of chalk. William had always been pleased that his initials were WW and never hesitated to scratch them into trees or posts whenever the opportunity arose.

Still mindful of what Fitch had told him of those eager to do him harm, Quinn drew his revolver and stopped at the screen door. A sepulchral draught flowed from within. He wondered if he should leave now, before it was too late, then realised it already was too late and had been for many years. No. He had to carry on. After coming all this way. After all these years. He stepped inside.

In the kitchen he inhaled and detected a smell of—what?—something sharp, medicinal, at once homely and strange. Everything here was dry and exhausted, rinsed of colour. Melancholy suffused him, like wine moving darkly through water. Ahead, the scarred, wooden table at which he had eaten hundreds of meals with his family. Where William would leer at him with lips smeared with jam, where Sarah, dear Sarah, would lean across and whisper into his ear her latest idea for their next adventure. Where their father would relate the latest notion he had heard from a bloke down The Mail as their mother urged them to please be quiet and
eat
.

The table's accompanying chairs faced this way and that, as if those who had been sitting here had fled, which perhaps they had. Crumbs of bread on a cutting board, a tin of honey. There was a basket filled with plates and jars on the floor by the door. A pearl of sunlight on a teaspoon, a pink daisy broken-necked in a disused medicine bottle. Quinn's heart ballooned in his chest. He heard a low groan, something creaking, and paused to listen. He jammed a finger into his ear. Again he heard it, the mere ghost of a sound. Then nothing. The house around him, above and below, was quiet. Then again, a soft moan emanating from his parents' room. He forced himself to creep along the dim hall.

He paused at the threshold. He could discern little but darkness, a thread of light in the join of the curtain. After several seconds, through the ship-sunk dark, the glint of a mirror and a hairbrush atop a dresser. Motes of dust glimmering and vanishing. A wooden chair. Teetering piles of books on the floor. The rest of the house, indeed the entire world, felt a long way from here. And high on a wall, in a wooden frame, an image of the suffering Christ melting from his cross—shoulders collapsed, blood weeping from the gash at his side, the thin and ruined hull of his ribs. Then, gaining shape, a bed hard up against a curtained window, hotly rumpled, its bedding a miniature mountain range. A hand on the coverlet. Long, thin fingers. Someone asleep. A woman.

The curious smell he had noted earlier was stronger here, almost overpowering. He held the sprigs of lavender to his nose and suppressed a cough. He stood there for several minutes, until he succumbed to the gravitational pull of history, of family, of love, and crept to his mother's bedside.

She did not look well. She lay in the middle of a large bed beneath a mess of blankets. Her face, which he remembered as round and smiling, was now thin and elongated. Her breathing was thick, bubbly, as if she were half buried in mud. And around her neck, hanging against her sweaty throat, was the source of the unusual smell: a clumsy necklace of camphor balls threaded on twine.

Quinn watched his mother for some time, transfixed. Her long, dark hair sprawled on the pillow. One of the camphor balls nestled in the damp and trembling notch of her throat. The clock ticked. She looked awful, but at least she was alive. The flood of Quinn's relief swept all before it.

She shifted beneath the pile of bedding and opened her eyes. She focused on him at once, as if she had known all along where he would stand upon his return, no matter how many years later. But still she cowered. “Who are you?” she croaked.

Quinn removed the handful of lavender from his face.

“My God,” his mother said. “My God.” Her eyes dropped to the revolver in his other hand. “Have you come for me, now? I am not ready. Not yet, please.”

Quinn was speechless. He stared into his poor mother's terrified eyes and fled.

4

A
nother day passed. Shocked by the condition of his mother in that gloomy bedroom, Quinn stayed close by his campsite, loose-limbed and agitated, venturing now and again into the surrounding bushland, falling in and out of sleep the rest of the time. From behind his eyelids, the face of his mother reared up at him, gaunt and afraid.

In the late afternoon, when the sear of the sun had lessened, he stumbled on a circular grass clearing. He hovered for a minute in the comforting shade of the trees around the clearing, but then crept into the sunlight. After all, it was not France; there were no snipers here. Even so, he dug a hand into his tunic to touch his revolver as if it were a crucifix that, through his caresses, might alert God to his anxieties. The grass was as high as his knees and long sheaves of it bent and hissed in the wind. He stared up at the blue sky. Crows and other birds, those fortunate creatures unburdened by gravity, drifted high overhead, specks against the blue wash of sky.

He closed his eyes to better enjoy the sun's warmth. Soon he was startled by a sharp cry. He looked around blinking and saw, at the edge of the clearing, a small, trembling lamb. A farmer must have brought his flock up here to graze and this poor creature had become separated from its mother. Only its head was visible as it stumbled about in the high grass. The lamb saw Quinn, cocked its head and trotted over to him, bleating. Quinn remained motionless, surprised it approached so eagerly. The lamb stared up at him with its doltish eyes and twitched flies from its ears and face. It bleated again and butted his leg. Quinn kneeled to stroke its bony head. He brushed away grass seeds that peppered its frail, white body, its legs so thin. The animal made a sound like a giggle. It gambolled about the long grass for several minutes before returning to where he crouched. He could smell its moist and grassy breath and the scent of it—so warm and trusting, so alive—prompted him, inexplicably, to sob. The lamb nuzzled his shoulder. Quinn found himself consoling the creature in a whisper, saying to it the things one might say to an ailing infant or one who has woken crying from a nightmare.

They stayed unmoving for a long time. It was the most peaceful moment he had experienced for many years. He felt secure. Shadows stretched over them as heat drained from the afternoon, and Quinn wondered what God would make of them, man and beast, as he cast his all-seeing eyes over the land.

Crouching in the bush, Quinn continued to study his father's house over subsequent days. Nathaniel often lingered uneasily on the veranda, apparently talking to himself. He realised his father—fearful of infection—was speaking with Quinn's mother through the open window to her room. Before he departed on horseback, his father would stand in the dusty yard for minutes at a time and stare into the distance, as if waiting for everything to make sense. It was an attitude Quinn recognised, and he recalled his father gazing into the air as he considered the possibilities of the latest rumours he had heard at Sully's or in the bar of The Mail.

Nathaniel was an enthusiast. He considered himself at the forefront of modern thought and was at his happiest when seated with a stranger newly arrived from Sydney, brow knitted, chin in one hand, mulling over the latest outlandish idea shipped in from London. There were few notions Nathaniel Walker didn't countenance, at least briefly. After all, he would say to those (namely Quinn's mother) who sought to pull him up, hadn't he taken a chance in bringing his young family to Flint in the first place? What of the money they had made, how they had prospered! If he had listened to the bloody naysayers he would still be digging ditches for some farmer out west. Quinn's father had in his time flirted with growing rice, been a Fabian Socialist and invested in an oil called Gingerman's Lotion, which was guaranteed to cure baldness but left the sufferer smelling like a sodden wombat. He was excited by electricity, by aeroplanes, at the myriad possibilities of alchemy. He was, in short, a man enamoured of possibility.
Can you imagine?
he would say, shaking his head in wonder.
Can you just imagine it?