Bereft (7 page)

Sarah's grave was beneath a towering gum tree. A fly buzzed about Quinn's face. He paused, panting in the drowsy afternoon. He stared at the headstone and felt a long way from anywhere, as if the rest of the world had drifted off, or he from it. He grabbed at a tree branch as one might the railing on a pitching ship until the sensation subsided. He waved away the damn fly, but it was replaced by another. His immense grief was precisely why he had not visited until now. He knew it would be like this. His sister. His poor, murdered sister. Would that he were able to exchange places with her—even for alternate days, as the twins of legend, Pollux and Castor, had been permitted to do.

The inscription on the headstone was weathered but perfectly legible.

Sarah Louise Walker

1897–1909

Taken too soon

Blessed are the pure in heart

He squatted by the grave and squinted out over the countryside. It was almost beautiful here. He pondered what his mother had said, over and over, until the words tolled like an incantation. A distant flock of birds caught his eye, and for a second, as they banked, they appeared not to be flying at all but rather hanging in the blue sky. Indeed, the entire world seemed stilled
. I would do anything to have Sarah back again. I would
do anything to have Sarah back again. I would do anything to have Sarah back
again.
A light breeze ruffled his hair. The world continued its revolution. The illusion gave way.

He plucked a length of dry grass and chewed on it. It was tender and sweet—grass that had perhaps been nourished by the remains of his sister, its threadling roots having sprung from her hollowed-out ribcage, the place where her heart had once thrived. He rested a palm on the baking earth, as if to reassure Sarah of his determination to help. He would do whatever she required of him, as soon as it was clear.

Last year, Quinn had met people in London who believed the dead could communicate with the living, but he reasoned it had little purpose unless the living were also able to offer something to those who had departed. Not that he knew what he might say to Sarah, should he ever have the opportunity
. I'm sorry
was inadequate now.
I'm sorry I was so late.

Ever since Sarah's birth, Quinn had been amazed by his sister. Like their mother, Sarah was renowned for her beauty, her wit and her exuberance. Her presence altered any room she entered, as if she possessed a current that charged the very air. She convinced William for a time she could fly but chose to walk so people wouldn't know of her powers. She tried to hypnotise their father with his own fob watch. She could draw forth cicadas by means of a curious song she warbled in her throat. His mother was right: Sarah used to order him around, could make him do almost anything. Once she demanded he wheel her about in a red wooden trolley for an entire day after he lost a wager over some minor matter that he couldn't even recall. Any other older brother would have refused—there was no way William would have ever agreed to such a demand, assuming he had been of the temperament to make such a foolish bargain in the first place—but Quinn acquiesced and endured the opprobrium of his brother and father, who suspended work on the fence they were repairing to watch
. Look at that
, they'd muttered.
Bloody hell.

When Quinn returned to his campsite beneath the pines, he felt sure someone had rummaged through his bag. The black, tubular entrails of his gas mask spilled from its haversack and his trench coat, which he had hung securely from a branch, was slumped in the dirt. Nothing was taken, however. His demob papers, his pay book, his few clothes were all there. A chill clambered through him. He stood still, expecting to hear or otherwise detect something in the breeze, a whisper or shift that might alert him to an unwelcome presence. He drew his revolver and patrolled the immediate vicinity, pausing here and there to examine a broken twig or possible footprint. But he found nothing and returned to his camp to make a fire.

During the war he had heard of soldiers being driven mad by the certainty they had been selected—through what process no one could say—by an enemy sniper, and these crazed men would expend valuable energy dodging and weaving through the trenches and across duckboards in the hope of escaping the bullet they were convinced was intended for them. It was a sensation Quinn now understood. Every so often he swivelled in the expectation of spying the looming shadow of the idiot Edward Fitch or, worse, his own uncle and father, come to hang him. It was well known that the bush in these parts sustained creatures undiscovered by natural science, and as a boy he had seen unfamiliar smears and paw prints in the mud by the river, perhaps those of water babies, or frog people, or hairy giants; those beasts created far from the sight of God. The blackfellas said there lived nearby a being who possessed the shape of a man but was red all over, with suckers at the ends of his fingers and toes to drain the blood from his victims.

Quinn strained his hearing. He jammed a finger into his ears. Nothing. Still nothing.

The doctors had told him the loss of hearing was a result of the booming sixty-pounders and there was little they could do for him. They said it would be temporary, but sometimes it felt as if the mud from those damn French battlefields would clog his ears forever. At times he heard the roar of a bushfire, at others a high-pitched keening. Over the past few months he had become accustomed to the noise, but the relative silence of the Australian countryside only made him more conscious of it, as if the war were still going on inside his skull. Indeed, his limited hearing now made him acutely aware of the sounds of his own body working away beneath the skin—of the creak of neck joints when he turned his head, his plodding heart, the gurgle and sing of his blood. Still, he was lucky. He had been told of one fellow who suffered a similar complaint, but for whom the sound in his ears was of a cat purring at his shoulder all day. There were, however, compensations for his diminished hearing; he felt sure his eyesight had improved in order to balance his damaged senses and believed he could now see things others could not. In London, for example, he had been able to spot acquaintances in milling crowds that remained unseen to those with him.

He sat on a log and stared into his fire. A spark corkscrewed skywards, like an angel being dragged back to heaven. It was odd to be alone. During the war he grew used to the press of many bodies, to the whiff of other men and their whispering hearts of fear. They were a brotherhood of terror huddled in the trenches with their foreheads pressed to earthen walls, from which they would pick scabs of dirt while awaiting bombardment or rifle crack. He didn't fear death. He imagined there were few miseries he hadn't experienced, and while those around him prayed for their lives, his prayers were far more simple—for release from all this.

Again he circled the immediate area surrounding his camp but could find nothing further and, when he was sure there was no man or creature observing him, he collapsed to the ground and fell into a fitful sleep.

6

T
he next day Quinn again made his way to his father's property. As before, he waited behind the low shrubs until certain there was no one else around, then trotted across the yard and crept into the house.

His attention was drawn to the short, horizontal pencil marks on the doorjamb between the kitchen and hallway. They recorded the heights of all three children. Each birthday, his father would brandish a ruler and pencil with ceremony (
No standing on toes! No slouching!
) to measure how much each of them had grown in the past year. Nathaniel, whose tongue always protruded from his lips when he concentrated, saying,
Hmmm
,
not so good this year. Must eat more carrots.
Mary laughing and gathering the other two squealing children to her, patting their hair in place with a wetted palm.

His father's crooked scrawl was now almost illegible. Quinn bent down and ran his fingertips across the words. Within the simple
William 1900 12yrs or Sarah 1905 8yrs
there nestled entire sagas of bruised knees and the time William nearly cut off his hand while chopping wood. How Sarah was always short for her age on account of having to spend a winter in bed with fever. She also missed a year when she decided she was too old for that sort of thing. Of William, who spent a night beside Sutton Creek to wait for the bunyip Sarah said she had spied there one day, describing the awful creature in such detail that Quinn—who knew the tale to be fabricated—found himself avoiding the area for some weeks. And his sister, poor Sarah, whose measurement for her twelfth birthday was the final entry for any of them.

When Quinn entered his mother's room, she was asleep but woke with a start after several minutes. Her bony hand wandered out to him. Her tongue clacked in her dry mouth.

“Quinn?”

“Yes.”

“Is that really you? Here in this room? I thought I dreamed you before—I mean I
have
dreamed of you. Many times. What are you doing here?” Her disbelief was heartbreaking. “I told people all sorts of things. Stories. We thought you were dead. I assumed you were dead. Everything so sudden and fast. I have mourned you, Quinn. For you and your sister both.” She fumbled at a sheaf of papers by her side until she located what she sought, and pressed on him a crumpled piece of paper.

“What's this?”

“It's the telegram they sent. From the Army.”

Quinn handled the telegram with distaste. Her eagerness to show him news of his own death was disconcerting. He hesitated before opening it. The words were faded. He skimmed and made out
Regret
, then
Sergeant Walker. Died painlessly. Pozières. Gallant. His country.
He refolded the telegram and handed it back to her.

Again she stared at him until, with a vague wave, she indicated her own face. “Your injury. You have changed so much. Surely only I would recognise you.”

“You have changed, too.”

She nodded as she drank from a glass of water, handed the glass back to him. “Well, a lot has happened. Besides, I suspect I am dying. The doctor refuses to say a word about it and your father thinks there will be a miracle cure any day now, you know how he is. He pores over journals and talks to anyone he thinks might know something.” She paused to catch her breath. “I have lost almost everyone, you know. All my children. Sarah, of course. You. Your brother moved to Queensland. My parents. Dear Robert comes by sometimes, but he is busy with his job. So many good people died in the war. Your father has gone wild. He took up drink and gets into fights at Sully's. He
will
kill you if he finds you. He has told me a hundred times. Robert, too. They will not be swayed. Your father became someone different from the man I married—I mean, he was always of his own mind but he never goes to church since it happened, and I am here lying in bed, dying. They call it a flu, but it is surely something more serious than that. There is talk of other, worse things. Some say it is the plague. Here, in the twentieth century, can you imagine, Quinn?”