Dust Off the Bones

he and Jack lived by: the stock routes in the droving season, then the train down south to the coast. Tommy did some traveling. Saw the ocean for the first time in his life and it made him so queasy he had to sit down on the sand and close his eyes. It terrified him. The endless uncertainty of it all, the way the thing breathed; it felt like the earth moved under his boots. He would take up drinking almost as soon as the train landed—there was nothing else for him to do. Sally had married a blacksmith from Mile End, and for a while Tommy nursed a broken heart, until a seamstress called Jacqueline helped stitch the wound. He was nothing like himself down here. He’d left Tommy McBride in Marree. In bars and at the racetrack he was drawn into conversation with groups of other men: people seemed to find Bobby interesting, he even managed to make them laugh. If ever they asked for his story, or about the fingers missing from his hand, he would make up some bullshit tale. He got in fights sometimes. He was tall, and strong with it, the kind with whom certain men like to have a go. He held his own, mostly. Being hit didn’t bother him. There was power in his swing. He felt a surge of abandon in fighting, and it surprised him, how easily violence came. More than once Jack had to drag him off a man, and Tommy would stagger away, panting, while whichever poor bastard had provoked him lay bleeding on the ground.

They were back up on the Birdsville Track, among the vicious sloping sand dunes south of the Warburton Creek, when one nightaround the campfire, the others all asleep, Jack poked the burning deadwood and said, “I promised not to ask when I met you,and I’m nothing if not a man of my word, but if ever you want to talk about it, I’m listening. If it would help to get itall off your chest.”

Tommy frowned at him. “What you on about?”

“Mate, I’ve known you long enough. I can see how it’s tearing you up.”

“What is?”

“Whatever happened back then, over in Queensland, when you were young.” Tommy dropped his eyes to the fire. A shiver againstthe darkness. Jack went on: “Look, you don’t have to tell me, but I’ve heard you dreaming, I sleep next to you every night.”

“So I get nightmares—what of it?”

“Nothing, mate. Suit yourself.”

“Come on, let’s have it. You got something to say?”

“All right, who’s Noone?”

There was a long silence between them. Tommy picked up a stone and hurled it into the night. “A copper. You ever hear of him?”

“Dunno. Don’t think so.”

“You’d know if you had. Well, he’s what happened. Him and everything else.”

“How d’you mean?”

A long breath washed out of Tommy like the breaking of a dam. “Noone was Native Police, had the district where I’m from. This one day, me and my brother went swimming at a waterhole, only when we got back we found our family killed. Shot, every one of them. Hell, they even stabbed the dogs. Our sister Mary hung on a while after but she went too in the end. They brought in Noone to catch them that did it, only he never did.”

“Fucking hell, Bobby.”

“Yeah.” He scooped up more stones and flicked them at the ground.

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

“Fucking hell. And is that what you keep dreaming about? What happened to them?”

“In a way, yeah. Also him. Noone.”

Jack was staring at him. “Why? What did he do?”

In the firelight Tommy glanced across at this man, Jack Kerrigan, one of the best he’d ever known. It would take so littleto tell him, to unburden himself—because if not Jack, then who? “He took us . . .” he began, then stopped himself. He couldn’tmake himself do it, couldn’t reveal himself in that way. If Jack knew who he was really, if he knew what Tommy had done . . .he shook his head by way of an answer, but it seemed Jack had already guessed.

“If he was Native Police I can imagine. Wait, you were there? You saw?”

Hesitantly, Tommy nodded.

“Fucking hell—I’ll stop saying that in a minute. Your brother too?”

Bitterly, he snorted. “It was his idea in the first place.”

“And this was what you were running from when I found you on the Strez?”

“Before that. Five years. Arthur got me away from there, saved me really. I didn’t want to see it that way but it’s true.”Tommy’s face twisted in the firelight. “All those people, Jack. All those people because of me.”

He’d not cried in many years now, but the tears began falling and wouldn’t stop. He lurched up and stumbled between the sandhills, into the empty desert beyond, fell to his knees and wept. Pain filled his body, washed out of him in gulps, and was swallowed by those immense and silent plains. He dug up the dirt and held it; dust dribbled between his fingers on the breeze. He placed his hands palms down on the earth, as if bent to the land in prayer. It had heard it all already. It knew what had been done. So much killing it had witnessed, so much blood and death and grief. Tommy straightened and sniffed and steadied himself, and finally the tears dried. The moon bright above him, the blackness peppered with stars. He wiped his face roughly on his shirtsleeve, struggled back to his feet. He could hear the mob grunting beyond the sandbar and just about see the glow of the campfire. He set off walking. When he got back to camp he found that Jack was already in his bedroll, with his head on his arm and his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep.

Tommy—

I’m in Victoria! Never even knew where the bugger was! Turns out the only places I’m good for down here is the Missions, which I wasn’t all too happy about but the truth is I’m better suited to it than most anywhere