Little Exiles

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.