Little Exiles

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.