‘On the road? What for?’
His articulation was so poor that, what with his head and his hangover, his guard could barely understand him.
‘Don’t worry. You’ll find out soon enough.’
He was in a fog again. To some extent he began to grasp that something was very wrong. Trying to understand what the wrongness was, was beyond him.
‘I need a drink,’ he said pitifully.
Someone cuffed him. ‘No, you don’t. That’s why you’re here. You’re a drunk.’
Yes, there was something wrong about everything because some remnant of his old self had him saying with great dignity, ‘I don’t drink.’
For some reason, when he came out with this the whole courtroom broke into laughter, and even the stern-faced man on the bench gave a great smirk. He began to protest—against what, he wasn’t sure—and it took two men to haul the inebriated ruin he had become through the doorway and out of the courtroom.
He was suddenly in a yard in the open with no memory of how he had got there. He was chained to other men and standing in the cruel mid-day sun. It was so strong that it hurt him to endure it.
He started to fall but was hauled upright by an ungentle hand. He could hear people laughing. Even the other chained men were laughing at him. Out of some dim recess of himself that knew what was really wrong with him, he dredged up a coherent sentence that told the truth.
‘I need a doctor,’ he said, and then everything disappeared around him again.
His next memory was of being in a cart with other men. His neighbour kept complaining bitterly and tried to push him away when he fell, lax, against him, bawling, ‘Sit up, can’t you, mate. You weigh a ton.’
‘Can’t,’ he said, and lost everything once more.
Then he heard someone calling out names. He was standing in a compound, surrounded by huts. He was still chained to other men. Guards stood about—somehow he knew that they were guards, though how he knew, he could not say. They were carrying muskets, old ones. How strange that he knew that they were old, since he knew so little of anything else!
Someone shouted ‘Waring!’
The man next to him prodded him roughly and said, ‘That’s you, ain’t it? For God’s sake, answer him so that we can get this over.’
He said ‘Yes?’ but it was really a question, not an affirmation, and before he could register anything more the world went dark again, a nasty habit it had which frightened him.
He awoke to find that he was lying in the shade and someone was holding a tin cup of water to his lips. He drank it greedily. A voice said, ‘This man’s not fit for work today. He appears to be in a drunken coma.’
‘No,’ he said. It seemed important to say it again. ‘I don’t drink.’ This time he was not greeted with laughter. Instead a hard face swam into view. ‘You’ve drunk enough to kill a horse, man. You’re sodden with liquor. Leave him to dry out. He should be fit tomorrow.’
After that he slept, or rather was unconscious, he was not sure which. Only that, in the morning when he awoke, for the first time since memory had begun in the courtroom he saw his surroundings quite plainly with an almost hurtful clarity, so that he wished that he were drunk again. Now this was an odd thought to have, and it disturbed him greatly, since he knew—how did he know?—that being drunk was something foreign to him.
The thought disappeared when the stomach cramps took him. After he had recovered and eaten a little, he was told to strip. He was given clean clothes—a coarse canvas shirt and trousers—and he put them on, shivering as he did so. He asked for shoes or boots—his had been removed, and the guards laughed at him.
‘No need, chum, you’re making roads, not walking on them.’
From some corner of his mind Fred grasped—if dimly—that he was part of a chain-gang building one of the new roads which was connecting Melbourne to the north. Not that he knew that he had been living in Melbourne when he had been sentenced to hard labour—he only found that out later.
He was clumsy and bewildered at first, because the whole world was strange, but one of his fellow prisoners was kind and helped him when they were fed at mid-day.
‘Keep your head down, mate, and always eat your grub up. You’ll not be able to work if you don’t, and then they’ll thrash you for being idle.’
His shrewd eyes saw more than the court officials or the chain-gang’s guards and overseers. ‘Ill, aren’t you? It’s not just the drink, is it?’
The man’s voice was coarse but kind. Fred’s short memory had no kindness in it, only curses, blows and kicks.
That night, for the first time, he dreamed of a tiger. It ran through his dreams, frightening him, while he looked for something which he had lost—and knew that he would never find again. This thought filled him with such desolation that it was almost worse than his fear of the tiger which nearly cornered him once.
In the morning the memory of the dreams stayed with him, and trying to remember what they reminded him of made his head hurt again—and the desire to drink almost destroyed him.
At this point in his effort to make sense of his brief past Fred opened his eyes and looked at the stars, bright above him in the clear night. He had seen them when he had been a prisoner in the chain-gang and in an odd way they comforted him. It puzzled him that he suddenly remembered some of their names quite clearly when he was not entirely sure of his own.
He had pointed the Southern Cross out to the man who had helped him, and who, when their time on the road gang was over, stayed with him when they were driven back to Melbourne and set free again. They were given a little money in return for their work, and Fred and Corny Van Damm, his new friend, turned into the first saloon they could find and within a few hours were lying dead drunk in the street again.
Corny looked after Fred, found him places to sleep where they wouldn’t be disturbed and protected him from the roughs who tried to steal his pitiful store of money from him. It was Corny who arranged transport for them to Ballarat where he told Fred that there would be easier pickings than in Melbourne. Corny also comforted Fred when he became distressed, usually something which occurred whenever Fred seemed to be on the verge of remembering his lost past.
The trouble was that every time that this began to happen it was not only Fred’s head which hurt him, but something else which seemed to be associated with his heart. This new pain was so strong that Fred found that the only way to overcome it was to drink himself into a stupor—whereupon it disappeared.
Corny also taught him to steal, beginning with fruit off stalls and barrows, but Fred wasn’t as clever at this as Corny. He was clumsy and got caught and kicked for his pains, but Corny looked after him as much as he could. One day a very bad thing happened. Corny was helping a stupefied Fred to find a nice corner to lie down in, out of the sun, when a pair of policemen stopped them.
The bigger one took a good hard look at them. His eyes widened when he saw Corny. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re Corny Van Damm. You went bushranging with Ryan’s lot.’
Corny let out a shrill cry, dropped poor Fred and bolted. One policeman ran after him, and the other bent over Fred and hauled him to the nick. Neither Fred nor the police ever saw Corny again—self-preservation being the name of his game. Without Corny Fred was lost. People tripped over him, and he was dragged in and out of the nick until Sam and Kirstie had arrived to free him, feed him, and promise him something of a future.
Remembering all this not only made Fred’s head hurt again, but disturbed him so much that when he finally slept not only did the tiger run through his dreams, trying to eat him, but somewhere in the background there was an old man who disapproved of him and frightened Fred even more than the tiger.
He shouted his distress