The Middle of Nowhere Read online

  Comity stood desolate and distraught, as the street filled up with camels, and the search party of cameleers tacked up and made ready for their expedition. At the other end of the street, Moosa turned in his saddle.

  “Well? Are you coming?” he called, and she trotted after him without knowing why, jumping over little mounds of manure in the roadway. You leave your friends behind as a camel leaves its dung. The words rattled around in her head.

  Moosa dismounted by the cemetery, and it suddenly occurred to Comity that he was serious about her asking Fred’s help. He was planning to summon up Fred’s spirit.

  Was that what Muslims did? Comity had no idea. Comity had kneeled beside her mother’s grave in the yard, talking to Mary Pinny, telling her the news and so on. She had even asked Jesus to fetch Mama back to life. But summon up ghosts? That was witchy and expressly forbidden, and definitely against Regulations. Even so…

  If Moosa knew a way for her to talk to Fred’s ghost, she would dare damnation to do it, she missed him so much.

  As row upon row of iron bedsteads came into view, Comity’s heart thudded and squirmed in her chest. Would they have to dig up Fred’s body in order to speak to his spirit? And even if Moosa knew some perfumed Punjabi magic to raise up ghosts, would Fred choose to come back from the afterlife? Seeing as Comity had let him down so badly.

  They passed the last of the bedsteads without stopping at any of the graves, and reached the date orchard beyond. No, of course, thought Comity. Ghans would not bury an Aboriginal in Muslim ground.

  “Fred. Fred!” called Moosa Rasul. “Ngai ouri!” It seemed a pitiful poor kind of ritual compared with putting on body paint and dancing and chanting in rhyme for two hours under a midday sun…and that had just been to summon up Tuckonies. The wind plucked at Moosa’s robes like hands; it stood Comity’s matted hair on end; it tugged at the date palms and shook loose a sprinkling of fruit. It shook a camel-skin shelter propped up on flimsy branches in the heart of the orchard. “Ngai ouri, Fred!”

  A figure, as twiggy and bristle-topped as a Punjabi toothbrush, emerged from the shelter and blinkered both his eyes against the flying dust. It was not a ghost, because it was holding a book and who ever heard of ghosts reading?

  “Fred?” said Comity.

  “Lilly-pilly?” said Fred. “You in trouble? You look like dead burdi I dig up one time.”

  Fred. It burst against Comity’s tongue like sugar every time she said it. His name was, and always would be, inextricably bound up with sugar. Apparently, when someone is sick in the Punjab, his family send gifts of sweets to all the children in the village:

  “To balance the forces of joy and sadness,” said Moosa. “Of course medicine too is important. But medicine and prayers work better when the forces are balanced. I thought you understood this.”

  Comity remembered her washed and mended clothes being handed back to her, neatly folded, a packet of sweets balanced on top, so prettily wrapped.

  “No! I thought Fred was dead! I thought the sweets were supposed to make me feel better!”

  Moosa nodded. “This explains your coldness when I brought you news. That the sweets had prevailed. I thought it strange.”

  “They were very good sweets,” said Comity, “only I did not know how good!” And she laughed again, like a mad person. She could not stop herself. Last time in Calgo she had cried – cried while people spoke to her, cried while they ate, cried while people were praying… Now all she could do was laugh. There was a definite need for a better balance between joy and sadness: this up-and-down was exhausting.

  She and Fred leaned against one another as they walked: Comity wanted proof that he was not a spirit, and he was supplying it. Also, both were rather like rotten fence posts which will only hold up if they lean heavily against each other.

  Comity explained her Big Mistake yet again, for Fred’s benefit.

  “Ah! The noxious Blighs!” said Fred, full of sympathy.

  Moosa, who was a stranger to lying, was less impressed. “Such a very BIG lie,” he murmured.

  “It grew big to cover up the little ones,” said Comity. “Sometimes that happens.”

  Fred was adamant: “Awake-dreaming is not lying,” he said. “You send noxious Blighs your most excellent stories. They damn lucky beggars. They should be glad. Jesus should to send bears.”

  “Bears?” said Moosa, hardly liking to ask.

  “To eat them up. Like Mr. Elisha in the Bible. He call bears to eat up noxious children. Verily he did.”

  Moosa shook his head and laughed. As a dutiful son, he had resolved to dislike and mistrust all Aboriginals as much as his family and neighbours did. But Fred’s wild stories and ridiculous beliefs had worn Moosa down bit by bit. No one in Calgo had wanted to house him once he was healed, but Moosa had installed him in the family orchard, citing the laws of hospitality until he got his way. Why? He is only a jacky! his aunts and uncles had said. But Fred could not simply be stowed in a crate labelled Jacky; he was a true original. And undeniably all-Australian.

  “We have to stop the Army,” Comity explained to Fred. “We have to find them wherever they are, and tell them there is no war and it’s all my fault.”

  “The Army must be found; this much is true,” said Moosa. “If their train is mired on the Calgo Spur, they need water and rescue. If they leave the train, they may lose themselves and die. We men of Calgo will fetch them safe home and tell them there is no war. If they doubt us, we will need the proof you suggest.” Moosa winced when he said it.

  “Yes! When the Army get here they shall see ‘mullah’ and ‘jacky’ sitting together on the ground, in perfect harmony.”

  “They will?” said Fred dubiously.

  “They might,” said Moosa grudgingly, “if you can find any jackies.” He was practical and organized and very impressive for a boy of sixteen or seventeen. But whenever he spoke to Comity, any warmth had gone out of him, doused by Comity’s Big Unnecessary Lie. “You, Miss Comity, and Mr. Boyce must stay here: pony and cart are no good for the journey. The ground is either deeply soft or there is gibber stone all over.”

  “Lend us horses, then, Mr. Rasul,” said Comity. “I have to come.”

  Fred’s assignment was to find a mob – any mob of fellow “fellahs” – and take them back to Calgo to create a picture of perfect peace whenever the Army chose to put in an appearance. So far, he had found the bones of an eagle, a feral pig, a cat tree festooned with corpses, a nest of centipedes and nine green emu eggs. But he had not seen a soul. He asked the landscape, shaped as it was from the bodies of his ancestors, but his ancestors held their tongues, threw dusty wind in his face and shunned him. He shouted his request up at the sky – “A mob! Any mob!” – but perhaps his breath smelled too much of Calgo hospitality for Byamee to listen.

  Suddenly and unaccountably, he began to be afraid: not for himself, but for Comity and Moosa. He abruptly stopped looking, and set off towards the Calgo Rail Spur. Not that he knew where it was.

  He should have retraced his steps as far as Calgo and asked for directions, but there was no time.

  Suddenly he was convinced of it: there was no time.

  The silvery acacias were pointing their shining twigs towards the horizon; the leaf litter rattling round his feet told him to pick up his heels. The shadows lapping from under the rocks seemed to point the way he should go, and the birds tumbling on the wind shouted, There! There! He ignored the nagging pain in his chest and loped in the direction (he hoped) of a derelict railway track.

  To his astonishment he found it. To his even greater astonishment, he saw ahead of him, also heading towards the line, the dust-smudged figures of an Aboriginal mob. The quiet murmur of singing came to him on the wind: singing and a familiar bad-tempered chunter of swear words.

  “Lulu?” he called, and the laundress turned and looked at him.

  Considering she thought she was seeing a ghost, she did not scream very loudly at all.

  Aboard the train,
water was rationed now. What had seemed like a temporary hold-up had become a marooning. Sand had blown in to such a depth that the train could not budge. A full regiment of men were available to dig it out, but with five shovels between them, numbers did not count for much.

  Thirst, the cruel landscape and the smell of gun oil stirred up memories of the Afghan War – in the older men at least. They shared their reminiscences, which were mostly grim and bloody and did nothing to raise the spirits of men marooned in a train in a dust storm, on a defunct branch line, in the Middle of Nowhere.

  The windows were so caked that there was no seeing out. The seats and floor were a uniform sand colour, and the field rations were grit sandwiches. Every gust of wind jarred the carriages and shook a caster sugar sprinkling of sand out of the luggage nets.

  As soon as the wind dropped, the plan had been to disembark and set off on foot for Calgo.

  “Should’ve done it last night,” one soldier muttered. “Wind dropped, and there were stars.” He was Outback-born and could steer by the stars when there was a need. General Gostard, however, was a city man and saw no use for the stars, especially with the nights so bitter cold and his officer’s bunk so warm. Gostard had put off disembarking till morning…and with morning, the wind had returned.

  The train guard came by outside, creaming sand off the windows with a broom. So the landscape revealed itself to the men inside in horizontal stripes: sky at first, then sparse tops of gum trees, camel heads, turbans, rifles…

  “The ghans are on us!” shouted a voice cracked with thirst.

  From his own point of view, the guard with the broom uncovered a row of faces stricken with alarm – men reaching for their packs – men reaching for their weapons. He turned to see what had caused their panic, and enjoyed the blessed sight of a ghan rescue party swaying towards the train. It was a Christmassy picture – two dozen magi on camels, bearing gifts and towing spare horses. To the guard, the cameleers were just about as welcome as Christmas Day.

  Then the windows of the train started clattering down, and rifles were bayoneting the air.

  “No!” cried the guard, waving his arms over his head. “They’ve come to—” He felt the heat of a bullet sear past his hand, and smelled cordite. A camel stumbled, screamed and unseated its rider.

  Shoot at a rescue party?

  Enraged ghans produced rifles of their own – ancient ones manufactured in the Punjab and modern ones made in Australia. They loosed off a volley of shots and retreated into their own dust cloud. The wounded camel, though, was left weaving from left to right, its head sawing up and down, uttering a noise as indescribable as that of the guard who had been hit by a stray bullet.

  A tin barrel of precious water strapped to the flank of the wounded camel had also been holed, and water spurted out in shining arcs. Seeing a camel he had bred, fed, named and groomed fall to its knees, bleeding water, Moosa could barely comprehend what was happening. Comity understood, though. The world was starting to end, just as the moon had predicted. And all because of her.

  Meanwhile, troopers on the other side of the train carriages, sooner than die in ignorance, dropped their own windows, to see if the ghans were attacking from the west, too. Instead of camels or ghans, they saw large numbers of naked men and women. Wearing tall stiff cowls of tree-bark that hid their heads from sight, the figures appeared unnaturally tall and alien, and were accompanied by a horrifying sound – a wowing, moaning howl as of one gigantic, unearthly beast.

  Panicked young troopers (who had never left the coast before now) levelled their rifles. Grit embedded itself in their eyeballs and made it hard to take aim.

  …But they fired anyway.

  At the first volley, the Aboriginals melted away into the dust haze, but the soldiers dared not take their eyes off the space where they had been, despite the startled cries of the men on the other side of the train:

  “She white?”

  “She’s dressed white.”

  “She’s no ghan, that’s for sure.”

  “Who?”

  “Her there. See?”

  Comity had got down from her pony and walked over to the wounded camel. It was the one who had delivered the piano, she was sure, and she wanted to apologize for putting it to such pains. And for getting it shot. Its flailing hoofs, the teeth champing the air, both terrified her. But the straps had to be unfastened, because the water tanks were stopping the poor beast lying down, and things need to lie down when they are hurt, don’t they? She began to struggle with the leather cinch fastened under the camel’s belly.

  Mr. Boyce could not help himself. He had made himself responsible for the child and how could he return her to her father in a shroud? He ventured nervously forward, waving his immaculate handkerchief over his head.

  “Leave the camel, Comity. Leave the camel.”

  “I cannot! It is the one that brought Mama’s piano.”

  “No. No it is not.” Moosa was there now, too, his silken parcel held awkwardly high above his head as he edged within range of the train and its bristling rifles. With his other arm he signalled urgently for Comity to come away, move away, get well out of range of the guns. “This camel is only one year. Small. Too small for pianos. It is true she is valuable,” he added bitterly, “but she is not your piano-camel.”

  A shot rang out from the train: some rookie had pulled the trigger by accident.

  “Is she pure Australian?” asked Comity.

  “All-through Australian, yes,” said Moosa, sweating pure fear.

  The owner of the camel began firing his rifle in the air to express his rage. The other men of Calgo began firing too. Their outrage smelled of gun smoke. They were working themselves up to fight.

  “Why are the Army shooting at us, Mr. Boyce?”

  “They must think they are under attack, Comity…as they very soon may be.”

  The friends and the dying camel were surrounded now by a whirling maelstrom of camels and horses whose riders were all shrieking their indignation. “Moosa, I beg you,” said Boyce. “Persuade your people to a calmer state of mind. Keep them from rashness!”

  “What you should do,” Comity suggested, “is buy the camel.”

  Boyce thought, at first, that she was being sentimental – childish and sentimental – but Moosa knew she was right.

  “Yes! Buy the camel, Mr. Boyce. Buy the camel, please, or there will be a great deal of blood spilled!”

  So Mr. Boyce set one foot on the camel’s rump and planted both hands on his hips. He was not a heroic build of man, and he regretted his baggy trousers now, which failed to say, This is a gentleman of the British-Australian Telegraph Company. “I wish to buy this camel!” he declared to the moiling excitement of angry cameleers. “Who owns this animal? I wish to buy this camel!”

  “Dead! Dead!” raged a turbaned rider, jabbing his rifle at the dying camel as he galloped by.

  “That does not reduce my affection for it. Kindly tell the gentleman who owns it to name his price.”

  General Gostard, striding purposefully down the train, stopped to watch the debacle with the camel. In front of him, over the rim of the window, came the face of the train guard, using his broom to pull himself upright.

  “I am hurt. Let me in, dammit,” said the guard.

  The General fixed him with a look of steely enthusiasm. “In shooting you, my man, the Enemy has committed an act of war. But have no fear: we shall make them pay.”

  “Just get me inside, will you?” pleaded the guard, but General Gostard was too busy planning for the battle to come.

  Mr. Boyce managed to pacify the owner of the camel, but tempers were still running high. He had to convey the full facts to the men aboard the train – tell them there was no cause for shooting – persuade them to lay down their guns. He gave his new camel a consoling pat and instructed Comity to go back, get back, get well out of range. Then he took a few nervous steps towards the train, waving his handkerchief over his head.

  A bullet
whined past his ear. He ran briskly backwards until he collided with Comity, who had not been following his instructions. “I cannot!” he said, wringing the handkerchief between both hands till it tore. “I cannot. I cannot. I am sorry. My wife thinks I am visiting friends!…Comity, stay close to me. You must stay out of range of those fools! And what is that infernal noise?”

  Comity cocked her head and listened to the howling, yowling, thrumming noise echoing off every surface, even the sky. “The Devil-Devil, I expect,” she said matter-of-factly. And she did not follow Mr. Boyce out of range. She went in his place to talk to the Army.

  She was not meaning to be deliberately disobedient. She could quite understand about Mr. Boyce having a wife. Anyway, it was not his war. He had not invented it. It was her war: she had begun it, and it was for her to make it stop. She headed towards the train, doing her “nice walking”.

  After every bath time, her mother had given her lessons in how to walk nicely, balancing a book on Comity’s head and having her walk around the patterned edge of the turkey carpet. Heel-side-toes. Heel-side-toes. She tried to do it now, although there were pebbles and things that had not littered the carpet at home. When she walked over a spent bullet, she felt the heat of it through the sole of her shoe. Mama had said that walking nicely would help her grow up into a lady. Comity did not presently mind whether she grew up into a lady or a bandicoot, so long as she did not grow up into Comity-Pinny-who-had-started-a-war-and-got-lots-of-people-killed.

  Then she saw the guard sitting propped up against a wheel of the train, his broom still in one hand. She gave up on heel-side-toes and ran over to him.

  “Are you hurt? I am so sorry. Oh, I am so sorry! It’s all my fault! Here, lean on me, if you want… You look like Britannia, sitting like that, with your broom,” she added, hoping he would take it as a compliment.

  By this time, forty or fifty heads were stuck out of the train windows, watching her.

  “You made a terrible mistake!” she told them. “There is no war! There never was.”