The Middle of Nowhere Read online

  They lifted her up through the train windows (General Gostard having ordered the train doors to be locked). And all the time that they were dusting her down, wrapping her in a gritty blanket, asking her name, she went on telling them how there was no war, and they went on saying she was “all right now, safe now”.

  General Gostard tugged down the blanket to blare in her face: “How many other hostages have they taken, little girl?”

  “Hostages?”

  He repeated it slowly, twisting his mouth into an ugly shape as he tried to make the words perfectly understandable, even to a weak-minded child. “How many people like you did the bad men in turbans take prisoner? Do you do counting? Show me on your fingers.”

  Every face was puckered, struggling to hear against the unearthly booming, howling noise assailing the train.

  “We came here to rescue you,” said Comity indignantly, wriggling out of the blanket. “Why are you shooting at us?”

  General Gostard did not like children. He could never guess what age they were, never guess whether the small ones were boys or girls, never command their love or attention. Women and children always complicated a straightforward battle. “You may not know it yet, child, out here in the wild, but the turban men are fighting the black men.”

  “No they are not, sir,” said a subaltern possessed of a pair of field glasses. He offered the glasses to his commanding officer, but there was really no need for them: the situation was plain for all to see.

  The howling noise had stopped. The Aboriginals had circled the train and arrived among the camels, horses and rifle-wielding ghans. Instead of a pitched battle, a strange meeting was taking place. With the awkward, wary dance movements of mating brolga-birds, bushmen and Punjabis nodded and bowed to each other, offered tentative handshakes, sidled into a line and – to the dismay of three hundred staunch and bluff soldiers – actually held hands.

  “It does not appear that they are at war, sir,” said General Gostard’s aide.

  Annoyance shook the General. He considered himself a man of iron, with a backbone of steel and the God-given gift of command. He was, in fact, a man incapable of changing his mind.

  “No! I see it now! The blighters are not at war with each other. That was not the meaning of the telegram at all! They have joined forces! They have formed an alliance against the forces of the British Commonwealth!” He parted his feet and adopted a more statuesque pose. “Our peril is the greater, but so is the opportunity for gallantry, by God! Your country is relying on you, men! If we must, we shall fight to the last man!”

  The train carriages sagged lopsidedly as a hundred troopers crossed to one side of the train and struggled to find space enough to level and fire a gun.

  “No!” cried Comity, not once but twenty times. “No. You are stupid! There is no war!” But it was as if she was invisible, mute or wedged tight in a nightmare. When the trooper put her down to ready his gun, she broke free and climbed out through one of the open windows. Rolling under the train, she disturbed an assortment of lizards. Emerging on the other side of the tracks, she stood up under a thatch of serried gun barrels all clashing and clattering for want of space.

  “Stop it! Do not shoot! Please!” she yelled, jumping up at the gun barrels, pushing at them with her fingertips. “Go back! Go back!” she shouted towards the friendly display of comradeship and harmony.

  Though outnumbered eight-to-one, the Kinkindele mob and the Calgo cameleers were so affronted by their efforts going to waste that suddenly there really was every chance they might truly join forces to avenge the insult. The mob discarded their collars of tree bark, the ghans checked what ammunition they had. An Aboriginal family appeared carrying a length of ripped-up rail from the track. No going back from here was the message.

  Moosa and Fred ran forward to meet Comity. They would have offered covering fire had either of them been armed. The fact that they were not armed did not stop the jittery troopers loosing off a dozen bullets in their direction. Moosa pitched on his face. Fred, a boy who had been shot two months before, lost all power of speech or movement or thought, and froze to the spot.

  Comity’s sprint came to an abrupt halt. She turned back to face the train. For one thing, she dared not look to see if Moosa was dead; for another she had friends to shield from the consequences of her wickedness. You leave your friends as a camel leaves dung, Moosa had said. Well, she would not leave them now. She would stand between the guns and her friends and make herself as big as a house. She had done a monstrous thing; well, now she would be as big as a monster, as unstoppable as a Kadimakara. Fred’s ancestors, when they were finally too tired, turned themselves into mountains and trees and rocks. She would be as big as a mulga tree, as flinty as rock. She would shut her eyes and rise above it all, and be like the angels when they got out all their six wings and their unspellable names as long as the Flinders Mountains. She would be the Flinders Mountains. She would summon back the sea that had once rolled over Australia! When water drops began spitting in her face, it did not even surprise her. She did not even trouble to open her eyes.

  But when something touched her outstretched hand, it made her jump: a dry, withered knuckly hand. Another, smoother and larger, closed round her other hand. She could hear fast, pent breathing and could not tell if it was hers or someone else’s. She was too busy resolving to be like Broad in the fairy tale, who drank up the sea for the sake of his motley friends… For once in her life she would live up to her name. She would be…

  “Comity!”

  The shout came from way to her left, but galloped through her head from left to right; it had always been a very gallopy kind of a name – comity-comity-comity – though she had never heard it quite so often before, nor set to the music of hoofbeats.

  Scared soldiers aboard the train strained to see whether their volley of bullets had hit anything, and to make sense of the thudding hoofbeats they could hear. A galloping horse was sending stone gibber flying in all directions as it passed close along the side of the train. The troopers only glimpsed the rider as he passed directly in front of them. And they were packed so tightly together that they could not swivel their rifles to follow him. In fact, the stick he was wielding clattered along their rifle barrels and knocked them askew. A few fell clean out of their owners’ startled hands. And when the rider reached the end of the train, he turned and came back again. Despite the meagre, dust-clogged daylight, his weapon flashed and flickered.

  “Put up! Put up! Put up!” he yelled breathlessly. “Put up, you heathen sanguineous men!”

  The stick, in error, hit a trigger finger, and a rifle went off, right alongside the horse’s head. The horse sheared away from the train in terror and put the rider in plain view of the whole train. Those who had thought the stick tipped with fire saw that it was in fact a crystal-topped walking cane, and that the knight’s clothes were all wrong for riding. The trousers were so tight that they had ridden up to his knees. The shoes were city shoes. The dapper waistcoat had lost all its buttons in the exertion. The sleeves had come adrift from the suit jacket. His horse’s fright had made the rider lose his stirrups and he was clinging to its neck, halfway to being unhorsed. A dozen troopers, nerves taut as piano wire, burst into giggles at the sight.

  General Gostard did not so much as smile. He raised his pistol.

  As the deafened horse turned in agitated circles, shaking its head, its ears crackled. The noise was duplicated by raindrops falling on the metal carriage roof. Huge raindrops, as big as bullets.

  “Desist in this ungodly belligerence!” The horseman’s voice was high and reedy with fright; it increased the laughter. But as Herbert Pinny recovered control of both his mount and his voice, and Horse came plodding and blowing towards the train again, the laughter faded away. There was a furious dignity about the man, who held over his head a small slip of white.

  General Gostard took aim. “Halt or I fire!”

  “Sir, I must protest!” said his aide. “The man is
under a flag of parley!” And he actually tugged the pistol out of his commanding officer’s hand and threw it on the bunk.

  “I have here a telegram recalling you to barracks!” shouted the rider. “Had you reached Oodnadatta, you would have learned the situation there. Since you became stranded, you weltered in ignorance and thirst. Your fellow countrymen were obliged to seek you out with water and relief.”

  Like a burdi drawing in its claws, the troop train withdrew three hundred rifles from its windows. In their place, six hundred cupped hands reached out to catch the falling rain.

  The rain cleared the air of dust. The telegram laid the dust of misunderstanding. The train doors were unlocked and Herbert Pinny was invited to come aboard. The fellahs separated from the cameleers of Calgo Crossing without a word spoken, and the two groups drifted apart.

  Only one row of figures remained standing in the open, like paper dollies cut from a single sheet of newspaper. Comity, Fred, Moosa, Loud Lulu and Mr. Boyce stood, arms outstretched, hand-in-hand. Not until Pinny signalled to them from the steps of the train did they glance at one another, kiss whatever hand they were holding, and let go.

  Even dismounted from Horse, even though he stood only as tall as the General’s shoulder, Herbert Pinny seemed a large enough threat for the aide to step between them while he read the telegram.

  “It does appear, sir, that we are recalled, as this gentleman said. There is no truth in the rumour of a war.”

  Herbert Pinny reached past him and struck Gostard on the chest with the back of his hand. “And yet you were ready to fire on women and children in your lust for pomp!”

  “Pomp? Pomp?” honked the General, struggling to hear above the drumming of the rain, struggling to read the wet telegram his aide had just handed him. He did not have his reading glasses. He was also allergic to being in the wrong. “May I remind you, sir, that I represent the Queen, the will of the Nation and the preservation of Law!”

  “And may I remind you, sir, that I represent Communication and the free passage of intelligence – two things you would appear singularly to lack!”

  “There are abos under the train, sir!” called a trooper from the next carriage. “Do we mind abos under the train?”

  “Why? Would you prefer them to stand out in the rain?” Pinny yelled back, leaving General Gostard, mouth open to speak, looking like a hooked cod.

  “Pinny, old chap,” called Jack Boyce from the foot of the train steps, “it is damp out here. Do you have room for one or two more?” He lifted Comity up into the carriage and her father, face as thunderous as Jove, grabbed her by the dress and pulled her violently up against him, his arm so tight around her that she thought he was about to denounce her then and there: the Girl Who Had Started the War.

  “This,” said Herbert Pinny, “is my daughter. My flesh and blood. My solitary joy in this torpid world. And would you SHOOT her? Without a question asked? Without knowing her reason for standing before you? These, her friends – would you shoot them because when they arrived to rescue your sorry hide, they were wearing a different colour skin?”

  Troopers were slowly encroaching on the officers’ carriage to listen in, jostling so close together that their kit made a noise like a herd of spiny anteaters.

  “A war was reported!” Backed up against his unmade bunk, General Gostard took his stand. “A war was reported! Words emanated from the telegraphic station at Kikundilly that… These things do not happen by accident!”

  Mauled and pulled about by the ferocity of her father’s left hand, Comity felt the very moment at which his anger ran out. He took the hand away and looked at its palm, wet and plastered with strands of her hair. The hand shook.

  Comity mustered her courage – which was a little bit spent, what with being a six-winged seraphim and Broad and a Kadimakara and a mountain range all in the space of five minutes. She knew what she must say.

  Please, sir (she must say) I sent the message about the war, to stop my cousins coming, because I told them lies and I did not want them to find out.

  It was very important that she did not mention her mother dying or Papa’s…difficulties. Or the dead people in the yard. That way, no one need ever go to Kinkindele, or blame Papa for being bullied by the stars and Mr. Hogg. It would not be difficult to speak up, not after being called flesh-and-blood and a solitary joy. Not hard at all. Let the Army take her back to Adelaide and put her in prison. Ten years from now, her father would come and collect her from the prison gate, because she was a solitary joy and flesh-and-blood.

  “Please, sir, I—”

  Herbert Pinny’s hand flew out again. Grabbing her entire head, he drew her face against his chest. Through his waistcoat she heard him say, “I myself accept full—”

  Jumping up the steep steps and shaking himself like a wet dog, nice Mr. Boyce erupted into the carriage, racked by a fit of the noisiest coughing. “I think I may shed light on this extraordinary turn of events,” he said, speaking uncharacteristically loudly. And taking a damp notepad and pencil from his inner pocket, he began to draw rows of neat perforated lines, holding the pad up against the wall of the carriage. “This, you see, is the original message, as it was despatched from Kinkindele Repeater Station Number Four. DO NOT COME STOP REGRET NATIVES AND CALGO GANS AT… And now we come to it.”

  General Gostard, his aide and three other officers peered over his shoulder at the smudged chain-link of dots and dashes.

  “And now we come to it, gentlemen… I take it you all read Morse?” (They would not, they must not. Everything depended on it.)

  General Gostard uttered a snort of contempt for all codes, Morse in particular. Three of the other officers turned away, defeated. But one captain remained at Boyce’s shoulder. “As a boy I mastered it, yes sir.”

  And Boyce’s lie fell apart, along with the notepad in his grasp. Ninety squares of paper fluttered from between its covers and onto the floor of the carriage. As he bent to pick them up, Moosa and Fred went down on their knees to help. Their heads touched. Words were spoken, though with barely a sound. Moments later, Boyce was up on his feet again.

  •-- /•- /•-•

  he wrote in giant, fierce dots and dashes that tore the page he was writing on. “W-A-R…” he translated. Then moved on to another sheet.

  •-•/ ---/ -•••/ ---/•-•/• /•

  he wrote triumphantly. “R-O-B-O-R-E-E.”

  “W-A-R-R-O-B-O-R-E-E,” said the Captain-who-knew-Morse. “Warroboree?”

  “Warroboree?” said General Gostard.

  “Warroboree?” said several bewildered voices. “What does it mean?”

  “Warroboree! An Aboriginal word, sir,” said Moosa. “A festival of story and singing and general jollity.”

  All eyes turned on Fred for confirmation. After all, how would a ghan know anything of the Aboriginal language? It was a well-known fact – well, up until today it had been a well-known fact – that the two races hated each other.

  “Warroboree. Yay. Verily. Byallmean,” said Fred. “Big singalong. Stories. Magic with loaves and fishes. Turkey on a spit.” Lying had always been his particular genius.

  Jack Boyce briefly closed his eyes and ran both palms over his skull, smoothing his splendid grey hair into place. “Who knows what caused the glitch, gentlemen? A momentary fault on the Wire…a bolt of lightning, a wild hog scratching itself against a telegraph pole, a thieving…magpie stealing one of the porcelain insulators… Such tiny mishaps are all it takes to interrupt transmission. Thus the final letters of the message were lost. WARROBOREE was reduced to a mere three-letter stub. FESTIVAL became WAR and a tiny mishap was turned to near-tragedy. No one’s fault, but a dashed close call, eh, gentlemen?”

  There was a moment’s silence in the carriage, which made Comity want to clap and clap and clap and throw flowers onstage, even though she had never been to the theatre in her life.

  Then, as the eavesdropping troopers passed the word along, and news of the ridiculous “mistake�
�� ran forward along the train, the sound of laughter grew so loud that it drowned out the rain squall. It even reached the Calgo camels, lugubriously chewing cud and flicking water off their hairy ears.

  Once again, the moon had risen blood-red. In the uppermost eaves of the sky, dust scraped up hundreds of miles away still hung in the atmosphere, colouring in the moon. Cautiously, Comity broached the subject.

  “Mr. Boyce says the world might not be going to end.”

  “I do not suppose it is for one moment, dearest,” said her father. He tasted some of the meat Fred had cooked them over the bonfire at their camp. “This is good. What is it?”

  “Don’t ask,” advised Jack Boyce. “Sometimes it is best not to ask.”

  This harmless truth hung in the air like smoke from the fire: sometimes it is best not to ask what the future holds in store. But Comity had an aching need to know: was the world about to end – her world, the world of Kinkindele? Her father answered her unspoken question.

  “I shall be punished, Comity. How could I not be? Six people lie dead in the yard, because I failed to keep order on my own station. When Hogg shot Fred, strangers saved him, not I.”

  “But you did not even know he had been shot, old man…”

  “Then I should have known, Jack. I should not have been locked in a back room, quacking like a one-legged duck.”

  Boyce shook his head so hard that he rocked on his haunches. “Extenuating circumstances, man. You were ill. Hogg seized his moment!”

  “Ill?” Herbert looked reproachfully at his old friend. “Ill?”

  Comity had devoted a lot of thought to this. Words are important. They are like things you throw when the stove catches fire. Some put the fire out. Some make the whole house burn down. “Brain fever,” she suggested. “In Mama’s novels, people are always getting brain fever. Men and women.”

  “You read Mama’s novels?”

  “No, but she used to tell me the plots after she read them, and many, many people got brain fever and no one thought bad of them for it.”