The ferrets are running now, tumbling over the backs of chairs, leaping at the walls, the redness bristling on their backs. He too begins to be alarmed. The flames are taller than he is. He runs at them and stamps a little but burns the soles of his feet. Snatching up a rug, he tries to stifle them, but they shoot out from under it, and the rug too catches, showering sparks. He has to throw it in with the rest. The whole room is aglow. It sweats. Grease runs down the walls. The ferrets are mad things under his feet. At last, with smoke thickening all round him and choking in his throat, he can think of nothing else to do but throw the window open, and, as the cold air rushes over his shoulders and the room gives a roar behind him, leap out into the night, and run, and keep running till he passes the last street he recognises and where anyone might recognise him.
It does not occur to him that he has stepped off the world. The streets he is moving through are cobbled, have corners to turn. Walking briskly though aimlessly, since he is in a place he has never been, and avoiding strangers, he comes at last to a deserted part of town, tall buildings with bricked-up windows and what he takes to be the rigging of ships. With his brain roaring, he sits for a time with his hands over his ears and his feet in the gutter, all the inside of his head a blaze of red; then crawls into a doorway to sleep.
Once, in the night, a fierce-eyed little ragman comes, and takes him by the collar, and tries to push him into a sack. He breaks away, climbs a rope, tumbles into a box, and falls dead asleep.
When he wakes cold sunlight is on his cheek. The box has no lid. But he lies very still as he usually does in this particular dream and waits for Willett to find him: ‘Ah, so that’s where you’ve got to.’
But it isn’t Willett. It is a big, tow-headed fellow of eighteen or nineteen, in a blue knitted cap and with dirty stubble on his cheek and no teeth, who hauls him up by the scruff of his neck so that he hangs like a rabbit outside a poulterer’s shop. The youth’s nose is on a level with his own; his legs are dangling. Then the mouth opens: ‘Captain!’ it bellows.
He had not meant to set himself loose in the world. He had not meant to end anything. He felt himself swinging now where the blue-capped youth held him in his fist, first one way, then another, and what he saw over the youth’s shoulder terrified him: no gas-lamps, no houses, but a vastness of an ashen grey colour crawling with smoke as if the whole world was burning behind him.
He would learn to live with this crawling emptiness, but the first glimpse of it made his belly squirm. He had cast himself loose and the world had run away with him; he was lost, he was dangling, and would remain so till Willett, in an odour of char, with his eyebrows ablaze and his scorched boots hanging from their laces at his neck, turned up again to curse and wallop him, then, with a growl, take him back. He never ceased to expect that event and to fear it. He expected it still. A world from which Willett had entirely disappeared was inconceivable to him.
Willett’s boots had reappeared: utterly real to him, every crack in their leather running with flame, the laces trailing, the tongue-flaps loose. It was Willett he could not find, though he heard him often enough, grumbling in the corners of the room, and smelt him there, a mixture of char and sweat, then at last the garden smell. He lay with his eyes closed, hands folded on his chest, his cheeks in the hot dark wet with tears. ‘Ah, boy, so that’s where you’ve got to!’
Where? Where had he got to?
Two years he was at sea. Or three. On one ship, then another: The Gannet, The Star of Newcastle, The Charleston — those were some of the names; last of all The Pamukale. He made himself small, had a full belly, was often bullied and worse by the others. Mosey. The Irish.
Old Crouch, The Pamukale’s carpenter, was a good ’un. He liked to sing hymns while he worked and had two daughters, one a seal — a silkie he called her; she could change herself into a seal. He learned to use a chisel, a plane, a spirit level. Then, one day, too ill to care what happened to him and with no knowledge of what part of the world he was in — how would Willett find him here? — they put him overboard; he moved out of the shadow of the ship that tilted and creaked above him, out of its coolness, away from the faces at the rails. Burning alive down there, he felt the sun leap out, a single flame. All he had known shrank to a black dot jigging in his skull.
These visions that dragged him back and racked his body with the reliving of what he had already endured a first time, left him weak and shaken. Despite the kindness Mrs Hutchence showed him, and Leona’s many attentions, he grew heartsick for his lean-to at the McIvors’, and for the children, especially Lachlan. Meg and Janet he also missed, though he saw them almost daily. At Mrs Hutchence’s they were absorbed now in a new life, the group round the kitchen table, where the presence of Hector and the schoolmaster, and the rapid talk, and so much laughter and play, confused him, kept him off. He began to sicken, and saw at last that what he was suffering here had to do with the sheets of paper where, months ago, Mr Frazer and the schoolmaster had set down his life. It was from there that the events of his former existence came and demanded to be turned back again from magic squiggles into the pain, joy, grief he was torn by, and which his present body was too weak to endure.
More and more now he was haunted by those sheets, seven in all, he had not forgotten the number, that Mr Frazer had folded and put into his pocket, and which he had never seen again; till he was convinced that the only way to save himself from so much racking, and despair and sweat, was to get them back again. They would be in one place or the other, those sheets; either at Mr Frazer’s or at the schoolhouse. All he needed was the strength to get there. But that was just what their magic had drawn from him.
17
WHEN LACHLAN BEATTIE looked about, it seemed to him that his whole world had come apart. The group of younger boys he moved among was all edge and shove. Their code was the same one their fathers used, but their fathers had seen enough of others’ and their own deficiencies to draw back from unyielding absolutes. They could not. Lachlan, though he was smaller than the rest, had till now held authority over them and commanded fellows like Jeff Murcutt and the younger Corcorans. They saw their chance now and were after him.
He had always been a firebrand. When he first came among them it had amused the older fellows to taunt him. At the least touch he would fly red-faced to the attack. The others would strike back, but in a lazy fashion, condescendingly, since they were so much older. ‘Lay off,’ they would drawl, ‘you mad bugger!’ Very fast on his feet, he would duck in under their fists and leave them winded. They learned then. ‘Honest, Locky,’ Hec Gosper would tell him as they started off home, ‘you’re bloody mad!’
Hector, in those days, had not yet moved up into the group of older fellows, young men almost, who hung about the verandah of the store. Though convention decreed that he should ignore a mere ten-year-old so long as they were in company, Hector had from the beginning taken the younger boy under his wing. Lachlan, who was unhappy in the new place, was grateful for it, but wary too, at first. His accent was the point on which he was tormented, and he was concerned that what Hector might have in mind was a shared impediment.
It was a mean thought, and when he saw, as he did almost immediately, how open Hector was, how little of his own indirectness there was in the other boy, he was ashamed. There was always this seed of self-consciousness in him that made him suspicious and spoiled things. He grew fond of Hector and depended on him, so it was distressing when Gemmy’s coming raised a conflict between them.