The Middle of Nowhere Read online

  “You can save him?”

  “Allah is merciful.”

  What kind of answer was that? “Where are we going?” asked Comity.

  “To my humble home, naturally,” he said. “You must not deny me that honour.”

  Fred made a feeble attempt to escape – “Yirra! Yirra!” – but Moosa overruled him: “Nah, kubang. Malka karak.” He saw Comity’s astonishment. “We should all learn to understand our neighbours.” He laughed. “But it is madly impossible. I have maybe one hundred native words, and my father would like to sweep those out of doors. “‘Why speak to the jackies? They are not like us’.” That is his argument. ‘Never mix the salt and the sand.’ A favourite saying here. But I say, mix it! Mix it up! The sea does, so why not us?”

  Calgo Crossing was not, like Oodna, on either the railway or the Wire. It stood in barren wilderness, at the point where two camel routes crossed, beside a spring. Ninety miles to the south-east lay Oodnadatta; sixty miles to the north-east Kinkindele. A railway spur had been built a few years before, branching off the Oodna mainline, so as to deliver goods and mail direct to the cameleers in Calgo. But it was closed so often by flash flooding or sandstorms that it had fallen out of use.

  The first sign Comity saw of the town was a carpet of fleshy, purple blossoms, finding water where none seemed to exist. The next was a row of half-buried houses. The branch-tips of two date trees reached up out of the dirt as well, like fingers scrabbling after air. Engulfed by a sandstorm, the first Calgo Crossing had been abandoned and then begun again farther on.

  Next came an ancient camel turning a wheel to raise water from underground. The water flowed into stone troughs surrounded by orchards of oranges, mango trees and date palms, and garden beds full of garlic. Some of the houses were mud-built, some used galvanized sheets of iron. The mosque was bigger even than Telegraph House, its iron roof covered over with cane grass. And behind the tin mosque lay a cemetery where dozens of iron bedsteads stood in neat lines. Perhaps the ghans laid out their dead for the buzzards to eat, then let the bones just rattle through into the dust. Or perhaps not.

  Comity had no idea if she was a prisoner or a hunting trophy brought home by Moosa. True, she had survived the night, but for all she knew that was because the ghans liked their meat fresh and she was the main ingredient for dinner. Calgo Crossing smelled of curried children, or so it seemed to Comity.

  The women sitting by their doorways sewing, the children outside the schoolhouse, all watched Moosa’s camel go by – then the travois containing the wreck of a boy, and then Comity riding Horse. Small children ran alongside. The men followed at a distance, drawn by curiosity and the chance to tell Moosa Rasul he was a fool.

  So here they were, among people Fred hated and feared, and it was all Comity’s fault, because she had not wanted Fred to die. Now he would be buried somewhere away from both his ancestors and the moon, and his soul would be left wandering far from home. She wanted to tell the police that Quartz Hogg had shot Fred in cold blood, but there were no policemen in Calgo: the ghans probably did not believe in laws.

  The whole length of the single street, not one smile greeted them. Old men with faces like wrinkled leather scowled at Moosa and rapped at their heads as if the boy might have overlooked his turban or sacrilegiously thrown it away. But Moosa had used his turban to bandage Fred’s wound and Comity’s leg.

  Moosa’s parents were not overjoyed by the caravanserai of oddities he had collected. Why? What made you bring these home? said the faces in the living room. His father took off his spectacles so as to see less clearly Comity in her torn clothes. His wife fetched out a pristine white robe as big as a sail and engulfed Comity in it, along with a perfume of lemons. A girl brought her a tin cup of water; she was wearing clothes stitched with sequins and dyed sea-blue. The crowd gathering outside stared in at the door with open curiosity, and barely stepped aside as Moosa carried Fred indoors, dropping words in his face from between those supremely white teeth: “Cull-la. Cull-la, kardang.” Another child hardly taller than Comity’s waist took hold of her hand, shaped it into a curve and deposited a warm sticky dollop of something into the palm.

  Before long, the local doctor pushed his way through and began to undo all Moosa’s careful bandaging. He seemed offended by the sight of an Aboriginal bleeding onto a Muslim mattress, and Moosa’s mother instantly despatched the soiled turban for burning.

  “Will he die? Will Fred be all right?” Comity asked, but the doctor spoke no English and no one chose to translate the question.

  The air round Comity’s head swarmed with the words of a mysterious language no Morse could ever transmit. She stared at their mouths, trying to understand, but had to fall back on guesswork. She guessed they were saying that Fred was dead but not worth eating.

  Oh yes, and all this while she wept – helplessly, uselessly, ceaselessly, silently – her whole frame shaking and swaying like a tree in a sandstorm. The words, the sounds, the voices were burying her like those date trees, right up to the tips of her branches, until she could no longer breathe.

  Somewhere outside, a thin, wavering voice rang out, and the crowd dispersed. Abruptly men and boys – including Moosa and the doctor – left to pray. The women too disappeared, and Comity was left entirely alone, thinking they must have gone to discuss what should be done with her. Perhaps she would be held captive, like Rapunzel, in a tin tower, so that she would slowly roast. And her father would not come looking for her, because he was curlew-cursed. And Fred would not come and rescue her, because Fred would be lying dead on an iron bedstead in the cemetery, being eaten by buzzards.

  She went and sat beside him. “I will make boots, Fred,” she told him. “I will do like you said with the emu feathers and hunt him down. Hogg cannot hide from the emu boots, can he, Fred? I will. I promise.”

  Over dinner, Moosa explained his other plans for becoming successful. Not only were he and his father going to breed the best camels in Australia, they were also going to move into the production of toothbrushes made in the Punjabi way, from twigs frayed at one end.

  “Cheap, very cheap. There is only labour to pay for, and it is work that women can do.”

  He wanted to expand the production of dates by planting more palms – a forest of date palms – and ship crate-loads from Oodnadatta to Adelaide and Melbourne. Also mango jam. Moosa had plans to sweeten every breakfast table in Australia with mango jam. Leaning forward to scoop up a mouthful of curry with finger and thumb, he would look eagerly across at Comity and the food would remain (in his hand) uneaten in mid-air while he propounded yet another business plan. It was almost as if he was defying her to blink, defying her to think. He asked her nothing about herself.

  His father wanted to know what had happened at the mound springs. He even asked it in English.

  “Attack by a wild camel,” said Moosa with casual haste.

  “But the jacky is shooted!”

  “I saw nothing of that.” Moosa simply would not let the conversation take Comity back to the horrors of the previous two days. He pinned her in the present moment with his intense, immense eyes and his lively conversation. “Of course, I wish above all to be a poet, but poetry is a gift from Allah. Baba – recite to Miss Comity ‘The Lamp of God’. This is my father’s favourite poem. Please be so good as to listen.” And his eyes commanded her attention, coaxing her away from her own thoughts, packing her head with words as he had packed the wound in Fred’s shoulder.

  After the poem, his mother asked another question, which Moosa was happy to translate. “My mother asks what you think of our town.”

  Comity looked around her. Above every door in the house rested a silk-wrapped package like the one Moosa had wedged in the gum tree. Up high. Always high. She had tasted dates for the first time in her life and they were delicious. Beneath her, a threadbare carpet showed horsemen and fruit trees and peacocks. Outside, someone was singing a song from another continent.

  “I think I want to go home,�
� she said. “With Fred.”

  But next morning, when Comity woke, the mattress where Fred had lain was empty. The littlest girl brought Comity her clothes, washed and tied into a bundle; also a little packet of sweets.

  “Where is Fred?” Comity asked, but the girl did not speak English.

  An older girl brought her milk and dates, grapes and an orange and signalled her to dress in the robes she had been given the day before. Comity sensed an eagerness to have her out of the house. But first the girl made Comity pass three times through the door of the sleeping room, pointing to the silk-wrapped parcel over the lintel.

  “Where is Fred?” Comity asked of Moosa’s mother, who smiled encouragement but did not understand.

  No tin prison tower awaited her outside. Only Moosa and Horse and sunshine as harsh as bleach. “Where is Fred?” she asked.

  Moosa looked away. “Baba has sent a gift of sweets to all the children in town,” he said, and went to fetch his camel.

  “Fred is dead?” she whispered to the world at large. Horse nodded her head up and down.

  A wedge-tailed eagle flew over, higher than the rising sun, higher surely than the moon. She thought its beak must have scooped out her heart while she slept.

  One person in Calgo was called Mullah, and that was the mullah who led prayers at the mosque. He thought it dangerous to have a lost British child in the town. Never mix the salt and the sand: a popular saying among the ghans. Also, a dog had been howling in the night, which was a bad omen. So Comity was being returned to Kinkindele as quickly as possible, like a misdirected parcel.

  Though the journey was long enough to sing a hundred songs and ask just as many questions, Comity did neither. Horses hate camels and camels hate horses, so that Horse lagged way behind Mustapha the camel. (The saying must have been popular among horses and camels as well: Never mix the salt and the sand.) The distance between their mounts meant it was almost impossible for Moosa and Comity to talk.

  She ate the sweets she had been given. The sweetness was a shock on her tongue. She had forgotten about sweetness. For a long time, there had been no sugar at Telegraph House. Hogg had said it fetched in ants, and had taken it away to the stationery store. It might have fetched in cakes too, thought Comity, and cakes might have fetched in happiness. Fred would have liked there to be cakes.

  Comity watched Moosa, in his embroidered waistcoat and fresh white turban, sway to the movement of his all-Australian camel. She had forgotten about sweetness. She had forgotten – how had she managed to forget? – all the kindness of the previous day: the curry, the water, the bandages round her thigh where the camel had trodden on her, the bed conjured from nowhere, the poetry, the toothbrush given her to use and to keep, the fruit, the smiles, the fear pushed out of sight, the neighbours leading Horse off to the water troughs and bringing her back brushed and fed and with a sheepskin on her back, red threads plaited into her mane. How had Comity forgotten the little silk-wrapped parcels balanced above every doorway, that blessed her each time she passed below them and would keep her safe on her journey? How had she forgotten the billowing yards of cloth swathing her sunburned skin in softness, the arms round her, soothing her sorrow? Not her father’s, but Punjabi arms.

  When they camped at noon, Moosa rigged a canopy of cloth stretching from the saddle of his kneeling camel to a row of securing rocks, so that Comity could rest in the shade. He himself sat at a distance, cross-legged in the sun, until the sun told him it was time to pray.

  “You are like a good Samaritan,” she said as he kneeled and let her use his back for a mounting block. “You helped us.”

  “We must open our doors to strangers. It is the rule.”

  Even horses and camels can get used to one another in time. Little by little the distance closed between Horse and Mustapha. And Moosa was able to tell her about the British teacher who had taught him good English and geometry and the poems of Robert Burns until her death the year before. He missed her still, he said. Comity realized that she must have been the white widow who had married a ghan… Except they were not ghans, were they? She must remember to tell her father that Moosa came from India, not Afghanistan. She must remember to tell her father how he had saved her from a wild camel and from eating frogs and getting lost in the desert and burned skinless, and had fetched her home and taken care of her and given her sweets and grapes and four yards of muslin. He had tried to save Fred, too.

  Moosa told her of his plan (when he was rich) to make a stained glass window for the mosque at Calgo Crossing. He had seen one in a house door in Oodnadatta, and his teacher Mrs. Ameer had said that they were used in churches to make them beautiful. “It is important,” he said, “to give some beauty back to Allah in return for all the beauty in the world.”

  And Comity resolved to be friends with Moosa, because he too understood about beauty, just as Fred had done. He even managed to be beautiful himself, like a fairy-tale prince who smelled of attar of roses and curry and had hands as large and delicate as fig leaves.

  She also resolved to invite Moosa in when they reached Telegraph House, and give him orange juice and eggy fried toast, and rice pudding, and show him her mother’s embroidery, and have him sit in the rocking chair on the verandah where he could unpack all his wonderful plans, like Hogg laying out his luggage.

  Hogg!

  How could she have forgotten? Quartz Hogg would be waiting at Kinkindele, with his big army pistol and his clutter of other weapons, smirking and smug, pleased with himself for shooting Fred, ruling the roost, strangling the chickens, holding the power of life and death over her and her father and all things to come.

  “I cannot go home! I must tell the police: Mr. Hogg shot Fred! Take me to Oodna, not Kinkindele! I have to tell them! They have to arrest him! He’s a devil! I cannot go back!”

  Moosa Rasul considered this. The easy pace of his camel, the gentle flexing of his body forward and back in the saddle gave the impression of calm. Perhaps his kindness did not reach as far as Oodnadatta.

  “This Hogg: he is a British devil?”

  “Irish. Yes. But evil.” And she tried to explain about the monster in the stationery store (even though that had been a mistake) and the not-working, and the piano playing and the pitch-and-toss, and bouncing her on his knees and being disrespectful to his superior, and holding a party and going on a hunt for Fred… And all the while she was talking, she felt the truth fall through the lattice of words and leave nothing Moosa would understand.

  “The police will do nothing,” said Moosa again. “Not for a jacky.”

  “You had better not come near the house,” said Comity.

  She meant to explain that Hogg shot people for talking to her – foreign people – outsider people. But the terror was sitting so high in her throat that she only said, “Better not come near the house.”

  Kinkindele Repeater Station was a cluster of acacias and tea trees, spattered with blood-red desert peas. But for the slow turning of the windmill sails, it could have been a painting, though the goats were bleating.

  “Thank you for the toothbrush.”

  “You are most welcome,” said Moosa. He looked understandably hurt by her lack of hospitality.

  “And everything,” she added.

  “You are most welcome.”

  She meant to explain that Quartz Hogg would probably kill her for throwing rocks at him. Or because she had seen him shoot Fred.

  She meant to say that she did not want to marry Quartz Hogg – not in four years or five years or ninety-nine years! That Quartz Hogg had made himself king of Kinkindele. Then Moosa might have helped her, might have drawn the curved dagger he wore in his belt, and kept her safe from Quartz O’Malley Hogg.

  But she knew what would happen. Hogg would shoot Moosa too, and tell people he knew the boy from back in Kabul and that Moosa had fought against the English and chopped up babies.

  So she allowed Moosa Rasul to think she was a thankless, inhospitable child, to remount his camel and s
et out again on the long journey back to Calgo Crossing unrewarded. She failed to tell him that he looked like a fairy-tale prince and had almost saved her heart from crumbling to dust.

  Comity dismounted, sore as a pulled wishbone. Horse was eager to get to the water troughs. He went ahead of her, through the gate of the yard, past the fallen wash-post, the grave-marker of Mary Pinny…

  And the six newly dug graves alongside it.

  A massacre. Everyone she knew was dead. Everyone in her world had been murdered. What else could it mean? She turned to call out to Moosa, to fetch him back, but he was already out of earshot.

  One, two, three, four…

  She stood at the foot of the graves, all too sure of what had happened, but trying to guess at other explanations. An attack by native stockmen armed with porcelain-headed spears?

  An electric storm? No buildings lay in ashes.

  Leprosy? Not in two days.

  A monster lurching from building to building, tearing off the roofs and eating people as they fled? No roofs were missing.

  …three, four, five, six, seven…

  No. It was obvious. Quartz Hogg must have finished the work he started with Fred. He must have gone home and sat down by the forge and one by one picked off the wiremen, the blacksmith, the land manager and her beloved fa—

  Hogg was probably sitting indoors now, doing tuneless, sucky whistling, waiting for “his little fiancée” to get home. Seven graves: Amos, Hart, Cage, Smith, Sankey, Mama and…

  Who had dug these graves? They were so neat, so precisely spaced. But then Quartz Hogg was a finicky man – murderous, lazy and foul, yes, but finicky and precise. He must be the one who had marked them all with pebbles – that same way her mother used to prick fruit pies: C for cherry, A for apple…

  A …H …C …S …S …

  Already, illiterate snakes or lizards or chickens had scattered two of the markers, oblivious to the preciousness of names carried for a lifetime, identifying the uniqueness of each human soul.