George rolls onto the bed. There is only one sheet, but he wraps himself in it tightly, as if hopeful he will disappear.
‘George,’ Jon whispers, jumping on the bed alongside his friend.
George looks up, pudgy face drawn.
‘Yes?’
Jon does not know why he thinks of it, but he cannot stop himself now. ‘What was your mother like, George?’
‘I don’t remember,’ says George lightly, as if it is the most terrible thing.
Jon squints at him.
‘But I wish she was here.’ He offers some of the sheet to Jon. ‘Jon,’ he whispers, wary of the wild boys shifting around them. ‘Do you have it? Do you still have Peter’s map?’
Jon reaches into his short trousers and pulls out the page of the atlas. It means nothing any longer, just a few scribbles on a part of the coast they could not find again, even if they spent their whole lives trying. All the same, he stretches it out and, in the preternatural gloom, he and George study its contours.
‘That’s where we’ll find him,’ says Jon. George’s eyes widen. ‘He’ll be waiting for us there.’
Jon lies down in the bed, curled around George. The sounds of boys wheezing, the chatter of creatures in the scrubland, the endless desert where there is nothing to run to and no one to hear you cry – this, then, is his new world. He says his prayers to unknown stars and wakes, the following morning, to an alien sun.
V
‘There once was a boy who ran away. He ran as far as he could run, and when he could run no more, he burrowed down into the baked red earth. When he could not burrow any further, he curled up and slept – and, when he woke, he found little droplets of moisture on the walls of his den. He stayed there through the day, and the following night as well, rooting up worms and grubs for his dinner, lapping at the water that seeped out of the earth. And, in that way, he decided, a little boy could live.’
George likes this story. He has heard it three times already, but there is something in it that troubles Jon. All the same, he stays at George’s side while the boy continues. Breakfast is almost over – and though Jon cannot bear spooning the slop into his mouth, he knows he will be aching by the afternoon without it.
One of the cottage mothers drifts by, trailing rank perfume behind her. Some of the littlest boys, four or five years old, are bickering in the corner of the stark breakfasting hall, and she glides towards them. Moments later, one is lifted by his ear and taken to the front of the hall, where a corpulent man in black, his face full of jowls, receives him and carries him out of the hall. On the dirt outside, Judah Reed is waiting.
‘The little boy spent every day and night in his den. He did not grow up like the boys who did not run away. He couldn’t grow a single inch bigger, because his den wouldn’t let him. The seasons came and went without him seeing another living soul but the grubs he ate – until, one day, he heard the song of a kookaburra chick, lost in the desert …’
It is always the sound of the kookaburra that brings the smile to George’s face. Neither he nor Jon know what a kookaburra is, or what it looks like, but for George it is enough to imagine this otherworldly creature coming to the runaway’s help. There might still be friends to be found in this red and arid land.
Jon’s spoon clatters in his tin plate, but the sound is quickly drowned out. The corpulent man in black is back, clanging the hand-bell, and he parades up and down the long trestle table. The little one who was taken away is nowhere to be found.
‘Eat up, George. You’ve got to get going.’
The story will have to be finished another day. Jon pats George on the back and scurries out of the hall. The sun is already up, but the heat is not yet fierce. The boys here say that this is winter – though Jon can remember winter well, so it must be just another of their tricks. He leaps over the soft earth where the kitchen sinks empty out and takes off at a run.
The dairy is at the other end of the compound, over fields that, come the spring, the boys here will be tilling. He is running barefoot, but it no longer hurts; it took less than a day before his shoes were wrestled off him. At the head of the sandstone buildings – where Judah Reed himself lives – he vaults a fence and takes off across the field. In the scrub that surrounds, the youngest boys of the Mission are out on village muster, collecting up the kindling that will be used to stoke the boilers tonight. Jon spies a little one he knows as Ernest on the very fringe of the field, where the fields back onto a low forest of thorns. Ernest waves at him; some of these younger boys can barely say a dozen words. Left alone on their daily forage, they grow languages of gestures and grunts.
‘You’re late, Jack …’
Jon careers into the dairy. The old herdsman, McAllister, who comes in from the cattle station to check over the goats, lurks at the back of the barn – but Jon manages to slip in unnoticed.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jon begins. ‘I came as fast …’
‘Ach,’ the boy spits, wrapping his fists around the teats of the next she-goat in line. ‘I couldn’t care less, long as I don’t have to squeeze your share of these udders.’ He uncurls his fingers from a teat and, dripping with warm milk, reaches out to grasp Jon’s hand. ‘Name’s Tommy Crowe,’ he says. ‘Pleased to meet you, Jack.’
‘My name’s Jon.’
The boy named Tommy Crowe smirks. ‘You got a familiar voice on you,’ he finally says. ‘Where’d they ship you in from?’
‘England,’ Jon shrugs, kicking his bucket into place.
‘I could’ve figured that one. There’s some lads from Malta came once, but you can tell them a mile off.’ He pauses, pinching out a squirt of milk as he ponders this problem. ‘Isn’t it … it’s somewhere in Leeds?’
Jon nods.
‘I knew it. Second I clapped eyes on you, I said to myself – Tommy, I said, that lad’s got Leeds written all over him.’ He tweaks a teat and shoots a warm spray of milk straight into Jon’s face. ‘I’m from the old place myself!’ Tommy Crowe goes on. ‘Well, never spent hardly a month there, if I’m to be truthful about it. They shipped me over almost as soon as they could. Just made sure there was none of them nasty U-boats still sharking around, and packed us all off. There was a bunch of us, got evacuated out into the dales, and when we come back – bang! Nothing to come back to. I must have been about seven. Had myself a giant family – brothers and sisters, half-brothers, cousins who were brothers, brothers who were sisters. Almost every kind of family. Then …’ He shakes his head, grinning at the absurd tale. ‘I thought some of them might wind up here too, but I haven’t seen them since we were in that Home. Maybe they ended up somewhere worse – what do you reckon?’
Tommy Crowe must be thirteen years old, though he appears much older. He has a pointed chin like some comicbook hero, and sharp eyebrows that rise villainously, so that there is always something contrary about the way that he looks.
‘You done with that bucket yet?’ Tommy asks. ‘You can’t mess around in here, Jack the lad! McAllister’s known to take a riding crop to a boy for a bit of spilt milk …’
Jon looks over his shoulder. The old man McAllister is kneeling now, pressing his forehead to the face of one of the billy goats in its stall.
‘What’s he up to?’ Jon asks.
‘He’s eyeing up which ones are for the block,’ Tommy Crowe grins. ‘You won’t know how to slit a throat yet, will you? Lad, you’re going to love it. Nothing quite like it when that kicking stops!’
He flashes Jon a grin and,