Robert Dinsdale - Little Exiles

‘You write to your mother too?’ Jon begins.

‘Every month, ever since I came.’

Jon cannot bear to ask how long that has been. Nor can he bear to ask the question that floats in the air between them, daring to be voiced. If Ernest has been here for years, if he has written a display diligently each month, why, then, is he still here?

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I told her about the fences.’ Ernest tucks his head down, shuffling away as if embarrassed by what he is about to say. ‘I told her she can come and get me almost any time she wants – ’cause if there’s nothing keeping us in, there’s nothing keeping her out.’

They walk together out of the assembly hall. Sundays are supposed to be spare days, no work and no worry, but it doesn’t feel that way to Jon. Boys are gathering with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Some of them, it seems, have already found a way to cause mischief, and a strident cottage mother is hauling them by their ears to a waiting man in black, a creature much older than Judah Reed, with hands wrinkled like oversized gloves and a deep stoop that makes him look like a tortoise.

Ernest comes close, breathing out words Jon cannot hear.

‘What?’ asks Jon, tilting his ear.

‘I saw a road,’ whispers Ernest. ‘When he got hold of me to march me back, I looked up …’ He pauses. This, it seems, is much more magical than a world without fences. ‘It had a bank on both sides and … there it was. Like a river without any rain.’ His face dares a smile. ‘Tyre marks in the dust. There was a glass bottle on the edge, like someone just threw it there.’

‘There’s somebody out there …’

‘I saw it. They can’t stop me having seen it.’

Jon Heather stops. He looks at his hands, no longer bloody, except where the blood has worked into the crevices around his nails. ‘Where?’

‘Into the sun,’ says Ernest. ‘We should have been running into the sun.’

That night, sleep will not come. Jon imagines his display, winging its way to England. Over glittering oceans it goes, through tropical monsoons, around the cape of India, taking up with a flock of migrating birds who will keep it company all the way back to English shores. It is night when it arrives in the old town, but it roosts with those same birds in the gutters of one of the old terraces, diving down to find his mother as soon as morning comes.

She will hold that display dear to her. Jon knows it. Perhaps she will write a display of her own – but it will only be her emissary. She will be following soon after.

If he wasn’t so certain of the fact, perhaps he might be dreaming differently tonight. He pictures coming through the scrub again, the lone wallaby skittering out of his path, and seeing nothing but the bush rolling on. The world had never seemed so huge as it did then. His mind’s eye rolls on, and he sees Ernest, dangling from the arm of a man in black, the pair of them silhouettes against the dying light. Beyond them, Jon can see nothing but the undulating red plain – but Ernest can see more.

Somewhere, out there, there is a road.

He closes his eyes, ignores George’s pleas for a story, and pictures it snaking back to the sea. A road can lead you anywhere. A road can even lead you back home.

‘Jon Heather, you lazy sack! We’re going to be in trouble!’

Jon wakes, to feel fingers grappling with his foot, trying to haul him out of bed. There is a moment in which he might be anywhere in the world, but then he remembers . Fear grips him and he rolls over – and it is only then that he realizes it is George, not some haughty cottage mother, urging him to rise.

‘You were talking in your sleep,’ George says, indignant.

‘What did I say?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must have heard something.’

‘We’re going to be late!’

Jon blinks the sleep out of his eyes, bewildered that he might have slept so soundly, and looks around the dormitory. All of the other boys are gone.

‘You shouldn’t have waited for me, George. Now you’ll be for it too …’

‘I can’t go out on my own, Jon Heather, you know I can’t.’

They are fortunate, this morning, that their cottage mother is not feeling particularly vicious. When they emerge, blinking into the sun, she is drinking tea from a dainty cup, and simply waves them on with a withering gaze. All the same, Jon knows, she won’t forget it. They’ll have to be doubly careful for the next few days.

In the breakfast hall, Judah Reed is taking a register. He does not have a roll call of names, so instead barks out ages, and every boy of that age must then go to a certain corner of the room. Then he begins to count.

‘Remember,’ George whispers. ‘I’m ten too.’

‘Is there,’ Judah Reed proclaims, ‘a boy named Peter here?’

George’s eyes light up. His head swivels, like an owl’s, to find Jon’s.

Across the room, nobody raises their hand.

‘Does he mean our Peter?’

Judah Reed must hear, for his gaze falls on George and hovers like a hawk.

‘Shut up, George.’

‘David?’ Judah Reed calls.

This time, a little one raises his hand, but Judah Reed quickly dismisses him as too young.

‘Must have gone to the stations,’ Jon hears Judah Reed mutter. ‘Do we have the right number?’ The cottage mother beside him nods. ‘Very well.’

Once the head-count is complete, Judah Reed rings a hand bell and breakfast begins. Jon watches as he shares whispered words with two other men in black, and a particularly serpentine cottage mother. They sit together at the head of the hall, and two girls from somewhere else in the Mission bring them a tin tray piled high with bacon, eggs, and a jug filled with orange juice.

‘I was number one,’ says George, considering the bowl of dry hash he has collected.

‘Don’t you think …’ Jon’s thoughts are too fast for his words to keep up. ‘There isn’t even a list.’

‘So?’

‘The boy in the dairy, he reckoned Judah Reed doesn’t even know his name …’

‘I don’t think he knows mine.’

Jon Heather thinks: better keep it that way, George.

‘Eat up,’ he says, remembering, dimly, that first morning in the Home, the fat boy with porridge pumping out of his ears.

George pokes some of the food into his gullet, but the taste is horrific; it must be the scrapings from the bottom of a pot. After a few attempts, he perfects a way of poking it to the back of his throat, so that he barely tastes a thing, but by that point the hand bell is clanging.

‘Dairy for me today,’ says George. ‘I’m going to sneak a suck of milk.’

Jon should have thought of that. ‘Tell Tommy I said …’ Jon falters. ‘Hey, George,’ he says, as they traipse after the other boys into the morning light. ‘You do what Tommy tells you, OK?’

‘You don’t need to badger me, Jon Heather. You’re not Peter, you know.’

After they have parted ways, Jon joins a rag of other boys outside the sandstone huts. There are boys of all ages here, only the very youngest spared and sent off for village muster, and Jon finds a spot to stand among them, not too close to the front and not too close to the back.

‘What is it today?’ asks a little one next to him.

Jon Heather only shrugs.

They seem to stand there, in a useless clot, for an age. The coolness of morning evaporates, to be replaced with a dull, insistent heat. Finally, Judah Reed and another man in black appear from the dormitory shacks. They have, Jon knows, been carrying out inspections, making mental notes of which boys have failed to make their beds, or which boys have sneaked banned treats and trinkets under their mattresses. Once, a boy was found to have been saving chunks from his evening stew to have as a midnight supper. He had to make a trip to Judah Reed’s office and wasn’t allowed dinner for five nights straight, in order to teach him a lesson.