Читать книгу Little Exiles - Robert Dinsdale, Robert Dinsdale - Страница 10

‘There once was a boy who ran away. He ran as far as he could run, and when he could run no more, he burrowed down into the baked red earth. When he could not burrow any further, he curled up and slept – and, when he woke, he found little droplets of moisture on the walls of his den. He stayed there through the day, and the following night as well, rooting up worms and grubs for his dinner, lapping at the water that seeped out of the earth. And, in that way, he decided, a little boy could live.’

George likes this story. He has heard it three times already, but there is something in it that troubles Jon. All the same, he stays at George’s side while the boy continues. Breakfast is almost over – and though Jon cannot bear spooning the slop into his mouth, he knows he will be aching by the afternoon without it.

One of the cottage mothers drifts by, trailing rank perfume behind her. Some of the littlest boys, four or five years old, are bickering in the corner of the stark breakfasting hall, and she glides towards them. Moments later, one is lifted by his ear and taken to the front of the hall, where a corpulent man in black, his face full of jowls, receives him and carries him out of the hall. On the dirt outside, Judah Reed is waiting.

‘The little boy spent every day and night in his den. He did not grow up like the boys who did not run away. He couldn’t grow a single inch bigger, because his den wouldn’t let him. The seasons came and went without him seeing another living soul but the grubs he ate – until, one day, he heard the song of a kookaburra chick, lost in the desert …’

It is always the sound of the kookaburra that brings the smile to George’s face. Neither he nor Jon know what a kookaburra is, or what it looks like, but for George it is enough to imagine this otherworldly creature coming to the runaway’s help. There might still be friends to be found in this red and arid land.

Jon’s spoon clatters in his tin plate, but the sound is quickly drowned out. The corpulent man in black is back, clanging the hand-bell, and he parades up and down the long trestle table. The little one who was taken away is nowhere to be found.

‘Eat up, George. You’ve got to get going.’

The story will have to be finished another day. Jon pats George on the back and scurries out of the hall. The sun is already up, but the heat is not yet fierce. The boys here say that this is winter – though Jon can remember winter well, so it must be just another of their tricks. He leaps over the soft earth where the kitchen sinks empty out and takes off at a run.

The dairy is at the other end of the compound, over fields that, come the spring, the boys here will be tilling. He is running barefoot, but it no longer hurts; it took less than a day before his shoes were wrestled off him. At the head of the sandstone buildings – where Judah Reed himself lives – he vaults a fence and takes off across the field. In the scrub that surrounds, the youngest boys of the Mission are out on village muster, collecting up the kindling that will be used to stoke the boilers tonight. Jon spies a little one he knows as Ernest on the very fringe of the field, where the fields back onto a low forest of thorns. Ernest waves at him; some of these younger boys can barely say a dozen words. Left alone on their daily forage, they grow languages of gestures and grunts.

‘You’re late, Jack …’

Jon careers into the dairy. The old herdsman, McAllister, who comes in from the cattle station to check over the goats, lurks at the back of the barn – but Jon manages to slip in unnoticed.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jon begins. ‘I came as fast …’

‘Ach,’ the boy spits, wrapping his fists around the teats of the next she-goat in line. ‘I couldn’t care less, long as I don’t have to squeeze your share of these udders.’ He uncurls his fingers from a teat and, dripping with warm milk, reaches out to grasp Jon’s hand. ‘Name’s Tommy Crowe,’ he says. ‘Pleased to meet you, Jack.’

‘My name’s Jon.’

The boy named Tommy Crowe smirks. ‘You got a familiar voice on you,’ he finally says. ‘Where’d they ship you in from?’

‘England,’ Jon shrugs, kicking his bucket into place.

‘I could’ve figured that one. There’s some lads from Malta came once, but you can tell them a mile off.’ He pauses, pinching out a squirt of milk as he ponders this problem. ‘Isn’t it … it’s somewhere in Leeds?’

Jon nods.

‘I knew it. Second I clapped eyes on you, I said to myself – Tommy, I said, that lad’s got Leeds written all over him.’ He tweaks a teat and shoots a warm spray of milk straight into Jon’s face. ‘I’m from the old place myself!’ Tommy Crowe goes on. ‘Well, never spent hardly a month there, if I’m to be truthful about it. They shipped me over almost as soon as they could. Just made sure there was none of them nasty U-boats still sharking around, and packed us all off. There was a bunch of us, got evacuated out into the dales, and when we come back – bang! Nothing to come back to. I must have been about seven. Had myself a giant family – brothers and sisters, half-brothers, cousins who were brothers, brothers who were sisters. Almost every kind of family. Then …’ He shakes his head, grinning at the absurd tale. ‘I thought some of them might wind up here too, but I haven’t seen them since we were in that Home. Maybe they ended up somewhere worse – what do you reckon?’

Tommy Crowe must be thirteen years old, though he appears much older. He has a pointed chin like some comicbook hero, and sharp eyebrows that rise villainously, so that there is always something contrary about the way that he looks.

‘You done with that bucket yet?’ Tommy asks. ‘You can’t mess around in here, Jack the lad! McAllister’s known to take a riding crop to a boy for a bit of spilt milk …’

Jon looks over his shoulder. The old man McAllister is kneeling now, pressing his forehead to the face of one of the billy goats in its stall.

‘What’s he up to?’ Jon asks.

‘He’s eyeing up which ones are for the block,’ Tommy Crowe grins. ‘You won’t know how to slit a throat yet, will you? Lad, you’re going to love it. Nothing quite like it when that kicking stops!’

He flashes Jon a grin and, buckets dangling from shoulders, elbows and wrists, lumbers out of the door.

In the red dirt outside the barn, Tommy Crowe stops. When Jon hurries after, he sees him, leg raised on an upturned pail, surveying the untilled fields. The smallest boys are ferreting around in rabbit holes in the undergrowth beyond. The rabbits have long been driven from those warrens – even rabbits grow wise to the habits of hungry boys – but it is a ritual among the little ones to set traps, just in case. Rabbits, it is said, are English – and this is a magical thing to the boys of the Mission.

One of the boys has strayed further than the rest, has almost disappeared into the shadow of the eucalyptus trees that grow in strange clumps, their many trunks opening out like the petals of a flower. At last, he drops down a ridge between two low, sprawling trees, so that only the top of his head can still be seen.

‘Here,’ Tommy Crowe says, ‘give me that bucket.’ Jon does not know how to ladle another bucket into Tommy’s arms, but somehow he slides it into the crook of an elbow. ‘You’d best be after that boy,’ he says. ‘Have you seen what they do to boys they think might run away?’ He pauses. ‘I’ll stall McAllister if he shows hisself …’

Scrambling between the rails of a fence strung with barbed wire, Jon scurries over untilled earth, finally reaching the bank of red earth where the little ones are camped out. The eldest and most brave dumps his collection of kindling at Jon’s feet and smiles eagerly, like a dog that has brought back a pigeon to its master.

Jon clambers over the bank, kicking dirt into the mouth of one of the rabbit holes. Behind him, the boys suddenly shout out, chattering animatedly at this transgression. Over the bank, Jon can just see the silhouette of the boy skipping from one tangle of roots to another.

It is Ernest. Jon calls after him, and though he half-turns his head, he does not stop. When Jon has almost caught him, he slows, trots cautiously three steps behind. The little boy slows to a dawdle and they plod on together, coming to a spot where a pool of light spills through the trees.

‘It just goes on and on,’ says Ernest, his tone one of wonder. ‘It doesn’t end.’

Jon looks down. There is a look like fear on Ernest’s face, but it is wrestling for space with a burgeoning grin.

‘I thought there’d be a fence,’ he begins, watching Jon turn in bewildered circles, trying to seek one out. ‘Maybe there’d be a wall. A big old wall with spikes and locked gates.’ He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘But there isn’t a wall,’ he says, taking a seat between two huge roots. ‘Isn’t it the weirdest thing? You could just walk and walk forever.’

Jon reaches a barrier of tussocky grass and pushes through, feeling the jagged curtain fall shut behind him. He feels, for a moment, like a storybook knight, fighting through walls of thorns to rescue the princess trapped on the other side – but when he emerges he sees only the same shadow wood going on forever.

There is rustling behind him and he turns, expecting to see Ernest creeping through on hands and knees. The creature that emerges is something he has not seen before. It is only two feet tall, the bastard offspring of a kangaroo and hare. Tiny black eyes study him cautiously, and then it bounds away.

Jon pushes back through the thicket – but on the other side Ernest is nowhere to be seen. He starts, wonders if he has come back the same way at all, or whether the forest has, somehow, turned him around, stranding him only a short walk away from the Mission.

Then, he hears voices, shrill cries of delight. After long months of waiting, the boys of the Mission have finally trapped a rabbit.

Jon follows the voices back to the field. Some of the little boys are already kindling a secret fire; they will sleep well tonight, on bellies full of wild rabbit instead of the usual mutton and bread. Beyond them, Tommy Crowe is laden down with another yoke of pails, striding heroically out of the dairy.

Jon rushes to help him, remembering suddenly the threat of Mr McAllister – but all that day, and long into the night, he cannot forget the lesson of the scrub. It is a thought too terrifying to share with George or any of the other boys, something only he and Ernest might understand: in this prison, there are no walls.

That night, George is already tucked up in bed when Jon reaches the dormitory. Since the second night, they have slept in different beds, but George ordinarily sits at the foot of Jon’s, listening to stories Jon can remember from books. Soon, he will have to start changing them, bit by bit, to keep them fresh. No matter how much George asks, he does not want to start telling the stories they hear from other boys in the Mission – kookaburras befriending boys hiding in holes, jackeroos and jolly swagmen. Jon does not want his head filling with Australian stories, not if it means losing some of his own.

Jon slinks past George’s bed as softly as he can but the covers buck and a fat little head pops out, like a grub from its knot in the wood. Jon presses his finger to his mouth and George nods eagerly. It isn’t rare for one of the cottage mothers to hear boys chattering after lights-out and turf every one of them into the night so that the cold might teach them some manners.

The floorboards around the bed are still acrid where George had his accident three nights before. It was the first time he slipped up since they came here, but at least the boys in the nearby beds were understanding. Some of the others would surely have told tales.

‘You been to the latrine, George?’

‘I hate it when you call it that,’ George answers.

In truth, it’s hardly a latrine. It’s a shallow ditch the boys are meant to dig out, but rarely do.

‘I’ve been,’ George nods. He hates going there, but there’s a special dormitory on the compound’s edge where the bedwetters go, and he’d rather go to the latrine a hundred times a day than have to sleep there.

‘I’m cold tonight, Jon.’

‘This is winter, little George. It won’t get much colder than this.’

‘I miss the proper winter.’

Deep snow and howling wind and waking to icicles hanging from the inside of the window – yes, Jon misses the proper winter too.

Jon climbs into bed. The mattress is old and stubbornly refuses to bend to him, even when he kicks and punches. Like lots of the other boys, he has fashioned a pillow from old sacking that he has to hide every time the cottage mother makes an inspection. He beats it into shape and lays down his head.

‘Jon …’ a little voice ventures, ‘are you awake?’

‘I’m thinking,’ Jon says.

‘How come you’re always thinking? You never used to be thinking … Even in the Home, we used to play games.’

‘We don’t have things to play games, George.’

George grumbles, too afraid of upsetting Jon to snap back. ‘If Peter was here, he’d find them. He could make games out of windows or beds or pieces of brick.’ For a moment: only the whisper of wind around the dormitory walls. ‘Hey, Jon, what are you thinking?’

Before Jon can reply, the door opens at the end of the dormitory and, in the light of a lantern beyond, there appear two silhouettes: the first a boy, no older than Jon, and the second an imperious cottage mother who steers him on his way with a hand in the small of his back. The boy shuffles forward and behind him the door closes – yet there are no sounds of footsteps retreating. Every boy among them knows: the cottage mother is waiting to hear what happens next.

Jon and George watch the boy totter forward, moving between the banks of beds until he can find his own. All around them, the other boys turn away. Some bury their heads in their makeshift pillows. Others feign snoring, as if they have long been asleep. The only boys who watch are those who tumbled from the boats with George and Jon, but soon even some of those are turning away.

The latecomer climbs into bed and rolls onto his side. He has not undressed and, if the cottage mothers find him like that in the morning, he will be due a punishment, a naked lap around the dormitories or no breakfast and double chores.

George’s bug eyes swivel from the latecomer to Jon, and then back again. It is only moments before the whimpering begins. In his bed, the latecomer crams sacking into his mouth to strangle the sounds.

‘Jon,’ George whispers, ‘what happened?’

‘Maybe Judah Reed had to tell him …’ Jon’s voice dies. ‘… that his mother died.’

Jon drops from his bed and, keeping his eyes fixed on the splinter of light under the dormitory door, crosses from one bank of beds to the other. When he reaches the latecomer’s bed, the boy turns suddenly, so that he does not have to see Jon’s approach. Undeterred, Jon gets very close and whispers, ‘What happened?’

When the boy does not reply, Jon tries again. He reaches out, puts a hand on the boy’s shoulder, as if he might force him to turn. Suddenly, the boy does just that, wheeling out with a clenched fist to catch Jon on the side of the face. Jon’s ear burns, and he staggers back. The boy brings his fists up to his face, forming an impenetrable wall – but before the wall closes Jon has time to see eyes swollen and red. These are not the tears any boy might shed at bedtime. Here is a boy who has cried himself dry, summoned up strength, and sobbed himself senseless again. Tonight’s whimpers are only the distant echoes of something else.

‘Judah Reed just wouldn’t believe,’ he says. ‘I told him everything, and he said I was making it up.’

Jon creeps back to his own bed, hauls himself up.

Beside him, George is feigning sleep, but one eye pops open. ‘Well?’ he asks. ‘Is it his mother?’

‘No,’ says Jon absently, his mind somewhere else. ‘He … had an accident. Out on morning muster. He fell and …’

‘There isn’t a doctor here, is there, Jon Heather?’

‘No,’ says Jon. ‘Not for miles and miles around.’

Across the dormitory, the boy gives a great wet breath, and then he is silent.

Dawn. In the breakfasting hall, Judah Reed appears to have quiet words with some of the bigger boys, and then ghosts on, nodding at each gaggle of little ones in turn. When the bell tolls, Jon is the first out of the breakfasting hall, barrelling through the Mission until he spies the dairy buildings ahead. A shock of parakeets rise from the branches of the shadow wood, and he watches them cascade over. He wonders if they know what is lying on the other side. If he were a boy in one of those sorry Australian stories, he would probably stop and ask them.

In the dairy, Tommy Crowe is waiting, while McAllister shuffles in the recesses of the room, whispering sweet promises to the goats.

‘There was a boy in my dormitory last night,’ Jon says, sitting down to take a teat in hand. ‘Came in long after lights’ out, with one of the cottage mothers. He wouldn’t say what was wrong.’

Tommy Crowe nods thoughtfully, rounding off a pail and shuffling another one into place.

‘I heard there was honoured guests back at the Mission. Maybe it was that. They haven’t been round for a while. If you ask me, they’re rock spiders, every last one.’

Jon is struggling to produce any milk this morning, but at last a warm jet ricochets around the bottom of his pail. ‘Are they poisonous?’ he asks, picturing these savage monsters stalking the shadow wood.

‘Jack the lad, wake up!’ Tommy laughs. ‘A rock spider isn’t a spider. It’s …’ He pauses, not certain how to explain it. In truth, he is not certain where he heard the words. ‘It’s friends with Judah Reed and the rest. They come by sometimes, to take kids on outings, off to proper farms, show them how the Australians do it, or … Sometimes they get to go to a town. They have ice cream. They look in shops. That sort of thing.’

Jon tries to picture it. ‘Do they … adopt us?’ He does not say what he wants to say – I can’t be adopted, Tommy; I still have a mother – because, suddenly, he knows it for nonsense.

‘I think they took one or two lads once. One little lad called Luca. And a bigger one. I don’t remember his name. They brought that Luca back, though. I don’t think they liked him much.’ Tommy Crowe pauses, mindful of McAllister prowling behind them. ‘Look, Jack the lad, if there’s one thing you should know, it’s … keep your head down. Don’t go with an honoured guest.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know, Jack, but isn’t it funny? A day out with ice cream and big fat steaks and all the lemonade a boy could drink … but, once they’ve been, nobody ever wants to go out again. Some things just aren’t what they promise.’

Jon Heather knows that well enough. Australia was supposed to be a land of milk and honey, kangaroos taking them to school and plates piled high with treats. Now, he looks up, out of the dairy doors, at nothing but flurries of dust and wild little boys picking up sticks.

‘Come on, Jack the lad, I’ve got a special treat for you today! McAllister’s done his numbering, and we’ve got ourselves a billy to slaughter.’ Tommy Crowe grins at him sincerely, proud to be sharing this prize. ‘You ever killed a goat before?’

The question is so absurd that Jon is lost for words. Until only a few days ago, he hadn’t even seen a goat. He’d seen rats and cats and dogs, even a fox one night, ferreting through the dustbins on the terrace – but, for Jon Heather, cows and sheep and horses and goats are as much a fairytale as unicorns and serpents.

‘Is it … difficult?’ Jon asks, desperate to fill the silence.

‘It doesn’t have to be. You can do it nicely, if you’re good.’

At the back of the dairy, one billy goat has been separated from the rest. Tommy Crowe wanders over to the stall, and the goat approaches him tenderly. Crouching down, he cups its bearded jaw and strokes its brow.

The old man McAllister rears up from a neighbouring stall. Up close, Jon can see that he really isn’t that old after all, no older, perhaps, than Judah Reed. A fat black moustache hangs over his top lip, and his eyes hunker below bushy brown slugs.

‘He’ll cook up nice,’ McAllister says. ‘You showing this little one how it’s done, are you, Tommy?’

Tommy Crowe nods.

‘Reckon he’ll chuck up?’

Tommy laughs, secretly shooting Jon an apologetic look. ‘Wouldn’t be normal if he didn’t.’

At once, McAllister’s face darkens. ‘Just make sure he doesn’t chuck up all over that meat. It’s what you bairns got to eat. It all goes in the pot, chuck-up and all.’

After McAllister wanders out of the dairy, Tommy Crowe turns to Jon. ‘Let’s get started,’ he says. ‘You get round the back. He’s bound to kick if he gets a whiff of what we’re doing, so just watch out. I saw a boy break his ribs that way, once. He couldn’t go in his dormitory after that, so they had him locked up with one of those cottage mothers.’ Tommy shakes his head. ‘He’d have been better in the bush.’

It is Jon’s job to get around the back of the goat and force it from the stall. This is easier said than done and, in the end, Tommy Crowe has to leash the billy with a rope and tug him out onto an expanse of bare earth.

Tommy hands Jon the rope and shoots back inside to collect the killing knife. Alone now, Jon Heather watches the goat. It does not try and run, but simply drops its head instead, chewing contentedly on a clump of coarse yellow grass.

Its eyes are tiny, lost behind tufts of grey and white, but Jon thinks he can see deeply into them. Once, he had dreamed of having a pet dog. He would tame it and train it and take it on walks in the terrace, and call it his very best friend. A goat, he thinks now, would have done just as well.

‘Here you go, Jack the lad,’ says Tommy, reappearing from the dairy. ‘Take hold of this. I’ll tell you when it’s time.’

Jon finds the knife already in his hands. It is smaller than he had imagined, with a short handle and a longer blade that curves back against itself. Tommy has others stacked up – one with jagged teeth like a saw, one a huge cleaver sitting on a wooden shaft – and he circles the goat gently, cooing at it all the while.

‘Give him a hug, Jon.’

Jon recoils. He thinks of Judah Reed, putting his arm around a boy just before telling him: they’re all dead; you’re the only one left.

‘Go on, Jon. If you hold him properly, he’ll roll right over.’

Tommy Crowe is right. Jon advances, strokes the back of the billy’s head, and then drapes himself over its body. Bemused, the goat nevertheless relents, rolling onto its side like an obedient pup. It is then an easy thing for Tommy Crowe to take the rope and knot together its back legs and fore.

‘Keep pressing down, Jon. He’ll only try and get back up again.’ Tommy bows low, rubs his forehead onto the goat’s shoulder. ‘Won’t you, lad? You only want to get up!’ Tommy looks up. ‘Have a go, Jon. Bring his head back, see. The first cut’s the hardest, but after that, it’s plain sailing.’

Jon understands, too late, why the knife is in his hand. His eyes widen, he flicks a look at Tommy, another at the throat now exposed. Still, the goat is silent. Jon Heather thinks: it might at least cry.

‘Take it in your hand like this,’ Tommy says, snatching up a stick to show him how. ‘Then …’ He tugs the stick back. ‘Don’t be shy. If you’re shy, you’ll hurt him.’

‘Tommy, I don’t …’

‘Of course you don’t! Street boy like you … But, Jon, you have to. We all have to. If you don’t, they’ll know. Then they’ll come and make you.’ Tommy is silent. ‘It’s better they don’t have to make you, Jon. The thing is, they enjoy making you. It’s better not like that.’

Jon isn’t certain that he understands, but he pictures Judah Reed standing here, pressing the knife into his hand.

‘They’re making me anyway, Tommy. You’re making me …’

Tommy releases the goat’s hind legs. The poor brute kicks out, and Tommy must tackle him again.

‘I knew a boy who wouldn’t,’ he breathes. ‘It was when we were building the sandstone huts.’

‘Building them?’

‘We built them our very own selves. There was hardly a building standing when I got dumped here. But this boy, he wouldn’t mix bricks, and he wouldn’t kill goats, wouldn’t go out on muster or even pop the head off a chicken. Wasn’t that he was a cry-baby. I don’t think I ever once saw him cry. He just wouldn’t do a thing he was told. So …’

‘They made him.’ The way Jon breathes the word, it might be a spell that they cast, a terrible enchantment. ‘How did they make him, Tommy?’

‘The same way they’ll make you, if you don’t cut this goat. With nights in Judah Reed’s office and big old welts on your bare backside. With slop for breakfast and tea, so you’ll be begging for a hunk of lovely goat. Going out for lessons with honoured guests.’ Tommy Crowe pauses. ‘Do you want to know why I’m the only lad in this whole Mission who’s never had a strap across him?’

Meekly, Jon nods.

‘It’s because Judah Reed doesn’t even know my name. I never gave him a reason to learn it. He might have put me on that boat and brought me here, but he doesn’t even know I was born. And that, Jack the lad, is the only way to do it. So …’ He pauses, tilting his head at the blade still in Jon’s hands. ‘… are you going to cause a stink about this, or what?’

Jon strokes the top of the billy’s head. The silly creature must love it for, willingly, he tips his head back. With one hand, Jon steadies the head against the earth; with the other, he plunges forward with the blade.

He must have done something wrong, stabbing like that, for a jet of red shoots out at him and Tommy Crowe winces.

‘Don’t skewer it, Jack the lad! Bring it up, like this …’

The second time is more difficult, for now the goat knows what these two turncoats are about, and now the goat resists. Even so, somehow, Jon gets the knife back in. He tries to draw it up, opening the neck, but over and again it slides back out. Now he is mindlessly hacking, hands covered in pumping red, the blade so slippery he can hardly keep hold.

Quickly, the goat relents. Its kicking stops, and Jon reels back.

‘Up and away, Jack the lad! We’ve made a meal of this one!’

Tommy rushes around, grabs a broom handle from the dairy wall, and runs it between the goat’s hind legs. With one mighty heave, he throws the billy on his back and staggers to a dead tree by the dairy doors. Here, he slides the broom handle into the crooks of two branches and steps back with a flourish, the goat hanging from the tree with its throat open to the ground.

‘Damn it Jack, you’re letting it spill!’

Jon looks down. Too late, he sees the puddle of blood spreading around him, his feet islands rapidly being submerged in a grisly typhoon. Too stunned to do anything, he simply stands there, imagines the tide getting higher and higher, subsuming his ankles, his knees, the whole of his body. At last, Tommy Crowe pushes him out of the way, kicking two milk pails into place so that the blood might be caught. ‘It’s for sausages, you dolt … Blood sausages, remember?’

Jon looks up. The goat dangles with two gaping smiles: the first its lips, the second the great gash they have carved in its throat. Only minutes ago, it was a real, living thing; now it is a cruel mockery of everything it used to be.

‘You want to help with the butchering too?’

Against his will, Jon nods.

‘It’s easy enough,’ says Tommy. ‘Just take a hold of this knife …’

Once the goat has bled out, they strain to carry the buckets of blood away, into the dairy where fewer flies can set to feasting. Now, Tommy Crowe explains, there comes a job any old boy can do, without even a hint of training.

‘All you have to do is twist until it pops off. You ever get the cap off a bottle of milk?’

Jon nods, eyes fixed on the goat’s gaping smile.

‘Same thing, Jon. Go on, give it a go …’

Jon might keep still, then, were it not for the footsteps he hears behind him: McAllister knuckling around the corner of the dairy. With Tommy Crowe’s eyes on him, he steps forward. The goat is strung high, so that the head dangles almost into his lap. Up close, the stench is severe, steamy and sour.

He places one hand on one side of the goat’s head and, holding his body back as far as he can, the other hand on the opposite side. Eyes closed tight, he turns the head. It has moved only inches when it resists, and he lets go. Behind him, Tommy Crowe insists that he just has to try harder. When he tries again, something gives, and now the goat’s head is back to front. He turns again, his hands now oily with blood, and at last there is a sound like a pop. Stumbling back, he crashes into the dirt.

When he opens his eyes, the goat is staring back, a disembodied head bouncing in his lap like a baby boy.

Next, the legs have to be broken. This, Tommy explains, will make it much easier to whip off his skin. Each leg needs a good old yank, but when Jon takes one of the forelegs, dangling close to the ground, he can barely get a good grip. There’s a trick to this, Tommy Crowe explains. All you have to do is twist at the same time as you snap. In this way, the bone shatters inside. Legs, he explains, really aren’t so difficult at all.

‘You ever had a broken bone, Jack the lad?’

Jon shakes his head, hands still clasped around the two ragged ends of the leg he has ruined.

‘You will,’ mutters Tommy. ‘It hurts like hell.’

Under Tommy’s instruction, Jon is supposed to slice up the goat’s tummy, from its star-shaped backside to the great gash in its neck, but the hide is thick and it is all he can do to force the blade in. If Tommy Crowe were doing it, he says, he could have the skin off a goat like this in ten seconds flat – but every time Jon tries to draw the blade up, it sticks on fat and flesh. First, he has the knife in too deep; then, not deep enough, so that it rips out and Jon staggers, catching his own arm with the tip of the knife. Now, his own blood mingles with the goat’s, but Tommy tells him not to worry.

‘It takes some practice, Jack the lad. Once you’ve killed a dozen of these bastards, you’ll be able to skin anything. A cow, a kangaroo, Judah Reed himself …’

Even with Tommy Crowe’s help, it takes an age to wrestle the skin off. Now, it is naked, glistening white and red. The first thing Jon must do is collect up the guts. This is easy enough, because they slide out straight away. All it takes is the right incision – but when Jon sinks the blade in, a smell like shit erupts, and he staggers back. Coarse brown muck pumps from the hole he has made, and Tommy Crowe rushes to finish the job.

‘That’ll happen if you’re not careful,’ he says, wiping his hands of the thick slurry. ‘You put that knife straight in its shit sack.’

Jon tries to wipe his hands clean up and down his thighs, but all it does is make a dark brown mess, massaging it deeper into his palms.

‘Look,’ says Tommy. ‘I’ll cut you a deal. If I get this bladder out, you do the rest. If this goat pisses all over itself, he’ll be ruined.’ He stops. ‘Shall I tell you what pissed-on goat tastes like, Jon Heather?’

Tommy is a deft hand, and Jon watches as the guts cascade out of the carcass and flop into another pail. Some of it, Tommy says, can be saved for offal, but some of it can be fed back to the other goats. As he sets to sorting out the delicacies from the rubbish, he throws out instructions at Jon. First, the goat can come down from its hook, onto a stone slab at the dairy wall. Once in place, Jon can start hacking up pieces of flesh. This, Tommy Crowe explains, is the fun part. Each leg comes off easily enough, but you can carve up the back and neck almost any way you can think of – ‘use some imagination, Jon Heather!’ – and grind it down for sausage and stew.

For the longest time, Jon stands over the splayed-out carcass, trying to imagine it the way it was: head and legs, fur and face. A few strokes of the knife, he realizes, and it isn’t even a goat anymore. He stands frozen, willing the blood back from the bucket, willing the guts to writhe up like charmed snakes and dance back into the body.

‘Here,’ says Tommy Crowe. ‘I’ll finish it. Honestly, Jack the lad, I had you pegged for stronger stuff.’

‘How many goats have you killed, Tommy?’

Tommy Crowe shrugs, severing a big haunch of meat and raising it aloft. ‘They don’t call me goat killer for nothing!’

‘What about … back home?’

For the first time, Tommy Crowe blanches. ‘Not back then, Jon. It was Judah Reed himself showed me to kill a goat.’

By the time they are finished, dusk is thickening. Tommy rinses his hands in one of the goat troughs and, wiping them dry on his legs, steps back. ‘I’ll take these slabs down for salting and stewing,’ he says, hoisting up the wheelbarrow into which the remnants of the goat have been piled. ‘You happy enough cleaning out here? Them flies get everywhere if you don’t …’

Absently, Jon nods. As he watches Tommy go, he stands up. Even if he does not look, he can see the gore in the corner of his eyes, all up his arms and splattered across his shirt. In places it is already dry, caked with coarse sand, and he hurries to the trough in which Tommy washed. The water in the stones is milky and red but, even so, he drops to his knees and plunges his arms in. In the swirling water, flecks of flesh start to bob to the surface so that, every time he draws his arms out, another shred of dead goat is clinging to him. Worse still, the redness has seeped into his skin. Now he looks like George did aboard the HMS Othello, his hands and arms marbled, as if by a birthmark, deep lines of red in the crevices of his knuckles and the folds of his palm.

Jon rips his shirt off, balls it up to hide the gore inside, and tries to use it as a washcloth – but it is no use; his skin has changed colour inches deep.

Jon is still sitting there, watching the shadows lengthen over the untilled field, the darkness solidifying in the shadow wood beyond, when gangs of little ones stream past, arms heaped high with kindling from their daily muster. At the end of the procession, dragging his bundle behind him on a length of orange twine, there comes Ernest.

Today, he has red sand caked up one side of his face, as if he has been lying in the dirt. Jon finds himself hiding his red hands underneath his bottom, but it only makes him more conspicuous.

When he is almost past, Ernest looks up and, leaving the other little ones to march on, wanders up. ‘Jon?’

Jon Heather gives a little shake of his head.

‘What are you doing here? It’s almost time for the bell …’

‘I want to find the fences,’ Jon croaks. He had not known it, but he is close to tears.

‘There were no fences …’ Ernest whispers, throwing a look over each shoulder.

‘There have to be,’ Jon says. Anything else is too difficult to believe. There have to be walls. There have to be gates. There have to be locks and chains, just like at the Home in Leeds. If there aren’t, he thinks, this isn’t a prison at all. This is just real life. And you can’t escape from real life – not until, like that billy goat gruff, you’re stretched out on a stone with your insides taken out. ‘We just didn’t see. We didn’t go far enough. There has to be something … somewhere …’

Ernest lets his length of twine fall through his fingers and slumps down, using his bundle as a seat. Yet, he does not have time to sit long. Suddenly, Jon Heather is standing. Then, he is over the fence and into the untilled field.

‘There might be another rabbit,’ he says. ‘We can …’ He is going to say catch it, but then he remembers the blood on his hands, and checks himself. ‘… watch it,’ he finally says. ‘To see where he lives.’

There are no men in black by the dairy tonight, and it is a simple thing to climb up, over the red bank, and disappear into upturned trees and walls of thorn. He wonders what it might be like under those branches, how far a boy might have to go until he is in the woodland and not in the Mission. There is, he knows, only one way to find out.

The first step, and he feels warm red sand in between his toes. The second, and he is between two trees. He realizes that he is creeping, as if sneaking up on the lodge of Judah Reed himself, and when he takes his next steps his chest swells out. They are only a stone’s throw from the fringe of the scrub, but when he looks back half of the dairy is obscured by upturned Christmas trees.

He does not look back again until they reach the bushes where they last stumbled to a halt. He rests back, in the palm of one of the eucalyptus trees. It hardly seems to matter, anymore, whether they push further or not. They might be anywhere in the world.

‘Do you want to go back?’ he asks.

Ernest shrugs. ‘Do you?’

Jon Heather says, ‘I just want to see the fences. They’ll be at the edge of the wood.’

He takes off. Bolder now, he begins to run. Behind him, Ernest is still – but, moments later, he too begins to fly, whooping as he dodges an outgrowth of low boughs.

The trees are sparse and, for a time, grow sparser, so that soon they can see the sky darkening above, stars beginning to twinkle in the endless expanse. Then, at once, the trees disappear. Ahead of them, nothing but undulating redness.

‘No fence,’ whispers Ernest. There is fear in his voice, but there is awe too. They are looking at something beautiful yet terrible, evil and alive.

Jon Heather stutters to a stop. The sun must have disappeared suddenly, while they were in the shadow wood, for not even its red fingers touch the horizon. ‘It can’t be far,’ he trembles.

They bound across a world of low bushes and branches, unworldly things that seem to have been pruned into spidery shapes by a malevolent gardener. The sky is vast above them and the world is vast around.

Finally, a stitch in his side, he stops. Ernest catches him up, and then drifts on. ‘Maybe we missed it.’

‘We can’t have,’ says Jon.

‘We might have come through a gate. One they left open …’

The stitch in Jon’s side is severe. He presses his hands to it and crouches down. Ernest must be mistaken, either that or a fool. The men in black would never leave a gate wide open for any old boy to wander through. In Leeds, there were big black bars, with latches and locks and chains, all encased in ice.

‘Maybe it’s this way,’ says Ernest. He wanders on a few steps, and then a few more.

As his footsteps fade, Jon looks behind. Though he can still see the border of the shadow wood, he cannot see beyond. Perhaps the wood itself is supposed to be the fence that should be keeping them in. In the summer, its walls will close and its traps will be sprung, but in the winter, the cracks appear and a boy might slip out.

His eyes are lingering on the shadow wood when he hears Ernest cry out. To his later shame, he freezes, cannot even turn around.

‘Come on, boy,’ begins a deep, throaty voice, one Jon does not know. ‘You’ve come far enough.’

‘I …’

It is Ernest, floundering for words. Jon Heather sinks into the dust, feels something scuttle over the tips of his fingers.

‘Let’s be having you, boy. It’s almost dark.’ The man’s voice seems to soften. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell him you were out before dark. It’s worse if you’re caught after.’

Now there are footsteps again. Jon scrabbles sideways, desperate not to be in their path.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ernest begins, somewhere in the gloom. ‘I wanted to … see the fences.’

They are almost upon Jon now. He crouches, listens for a footfall, and darts forward. In that way, a few yards at the time, he tracks back towards the Mission. The shadow wood is fading in front of him, swallowed up by the gathering night.

‘I promise I …’

Ernest, Jon hears, has started to cry.

‘Save the tears, boy. It isn’t so bad. I could have left you out here, after all. It’ll be over soon, and then you can be a good boy again.’ He stops, the footsteps suddenly still. ‘But I can’t listen to your blubbering, boy.’ His voice hardens, yet it is barely a whisper. ‘So stop your crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.’

Jon cannot bear to hear Ernest swallowing his tears, so he hurtles forward. He takes huge strides, desperate not to be heard, leaping over the plain until the scrub starts to thicken around him.

He is almost at the edge of the plain, the eucalypts ranged in their ragged frontier in front of him, when he feels crunching under his feet. He stumbles. At his feet, there is a little cairn of bones: scrub chicken, if he is not mistaken. They are, he sees, not very old at all. He crouches down to peel a wing bone from his heel, and sees that the ground is scuffed up around him, as if some animal has made this its nest. But animals, Jon Heather notes, even Australian animals, don’t stop to build cairns out of their kills.

He might wonder about it further, but he hears them again: the man in black, and Ernest’s little voice drowned out underneath. They might be anywhere behind him; the voices seem to curl from every direction, borne on flurries of desert sand. Perhaps, he begins to think, the men in black are their own kind of fence, watching out for boys slipping through to pick them up in the nothingness beyond.

He crashes back through the shadow wood. Things skitter in the trees, but he pays them no mind. He only scrambles on, overjoyed to see the orbs of the border fires burning in the Mission beyond.

The darkness is almost absolute when Jon Heather crashes back into the Mission. On the opposite side of the untilled field, the dairy sits empty but for the goats milling within. Further on, the first wave of boys is already emerging from the dining hall, bellies full of gristly goat. Jon hangs at a distance and sees George among them, hands shoved in pockets, head tucked into his chin. He wants to call out, run over and fling his arms around the fat boy, but instead he looks over his shoulder. Other figures have emerged from the shadow wood now: the man in black, with Ernest propelled in front of him. If Ernest has been crying, Jon cannot see. He waits until they pass, and then waits longer. He does not have to follow to know where they are going, but he follows all the same. Soon he is standing at the centre of the Mission, where the column of sandstone huts marks a big cross. The man in black takes Ernest through a door, and then they are gone.

‘Jon Heather, you missed dinner!’

Jon turns to see George gambolling towards him.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘Well, why did you miss your dinner?’

Jon wants to tell him. There’s nothing out there, George. There’s only more nothing, as far as the eye can see – nothing in the north and nothing in the south and nothing in the east and nothing in the west. That’s why they brought us here – a nothing place for nothing people.

He wants to say all of this, but he cannot. He could never describe the yawning terror of standing there, knowing that, even if you ran and ran, you wouldn’t get any further away. There isn’t a boy who would believe it if he didn’t see it for himself.

‘What happened to your hands?’ George suddenly asks.

Jon looks down. It still looks as if he is wearing scarlet gloves.

‘It’s nothing, Georgie. I was working.’

‘It’s nearly bedtime, you know …’

Jon feels his feet rooted to the spot. ‘I’ll be along, George. I’ll catch you up.’

George folds his arms. ‘What are you up to?’

‘It’s …’ Jon turns, feigns a big smile. ‘I didn’t finish my work,’ he lies. ‘They say I can’t go to bed until it’s done, or I’ll have to go for Judah Reed.’

George’s lips curl. ‘Rotten old Judah Reed,’ he whispers, conspiratorially. ‘Can’t I help?’

Eventually, George is convinced and scurries for the shelter of their dormitory. It would not do, he knows, to be caught out after dark, not with cottage mothers and men in black drifting around, looking for lurkers.

Now that he is alone, Jon is suddenly afraid. He hears, dimly, one of the cottage mothers rounding up little ones as if they are stray chickens, clucking after them as she forces them up into their shacks. They will come for him soon enough, demanding to know why he has not also retired. If he was missed at dinner, somebody will know; somebody will ask questions, and he doesn’t know what he’ll say.

Once silence has settled over the Mission, he hears the faint sound for which his ears have been straining. He drops to his haunches, eyes fixed on the sandstone door, and tracks along the wall, trying to discern the exact spot from which the noises come.

Somewhere, in there, a boy is crying. It is, Jon Heather knows with a terrifying certainty, Ernest who is making those sounds.

The noise comes in fits and starts. Ernest bleats out, and then there is silence; Ernest screams that he is sorry, and then he is still. Every time Jon thinks it is over, it comes again, and soon he begins to notice a pattern in the sound, a rhythm, as if Judah Reed is a conductor and Ernest his orchestra.

Then, without warning, the sounds just stop. Jon listens out for them, realizes that he desperately wants to hear. As long as Ernest is crying, at least he knows Ernest is still alive. Yet now there is only silence: dull and absolute.

Suddenly, the door twitches and opens. Jon springs to his heels, ready to dart into the stretching shadows, but he is too late. Ernest appears before him, the man in black hovering above.

Judah Reed has a hand on each of the little boy’s shoulders, and he ruffles his hair as he sends him on his way. ‘You’ll be a good boy,’ he says, gently leading Ernest down the step and onto the bare earth. ‘Good boys make good men.’

Ernest walks forward, stiff and deliberate. His head is down, but still he seems to see Jon staring. Now, his steps grow longer. He is, Jon understands, trying to run, but something is stopping him. Dumbly, Jon watches him go.

When Jon looks back, Judah Reed has come closer, to fix him with a curious gaze.

If you were clever, Jon Heather, you would run yourself. If you were as clever as you think you are, you might have hidden in the shadow wood while the man in black escorted Ernest back into the Mission – and then, safe in the knowledge that the lookout was gone, you could have carried on running into the big bleak nowhere.

Judah Reed looks down at him, along the line of his crooked nose. ‘Let me see your hands,’ he says.

Jon could not resist, even if he wanted to. A force he does not know compels him to stand up, and he finds his hands coming out of his pockets, his fists unfurling to reveal those blood-red palms.

Judah Reed crouches and takes Jon’s hands, one at a time, in his own. It seems as if they are both wearing gloves: Judah Reed’s, monstrous and leathery; Jon’s, tiny and red.

‘It was a very good goat,’ says Judah Reed. A smile blossoms on his face. ‘You did a very good job. You fed the whole Mission. I hope you are proud.’ He pauses. ‘Are you proud, boy?’

There is a look in Judah Reed’s eyes like fire, a look that tells Jon: there is only one answer to this question. Being ashamed, he sees, is not an option. So he nods, because nodding is all he can do.

‘Some of the boys in this Mission could learn a thing or two from you. Australia will be grateful that you came.’

‘It won’t come off,’ blurts out Jon. His inside crawls, for surely he should be petrified, surely he should want to take flight – but, strangely, he finds that he wants to be here. It is the most peculiar sensation. There are a thousand things he wants to ask. It is, he realizes, only Judah Reed who really knows the way across the big bad nowhere and back to England. ‘I scrubbed and scrubbed but it wouldn’t come off.’

Judah Reed says, ‘It never does,’ and, smiling, returns through the sandstone door.