31

The pungent stench of the burnt-out surgery hung over the town. Smoke drifted around the ruins. Nobody was around, nobody asking where Joe was. Back at the station, I found a note from Mrs Schreiber. Her daughter had arrived and she couldn’t wait any longer. She left an address for me to send her wages.

I took off my tunic, brushed the dust from it and hung it up, changed out of the official breeches into a pair of old trousers, took off my official Mounted Trooper shirt and hung it over the back of the chair, good for another wear.

I found another bottle of whisky, a pack of cigarettes and some matches, and placed them on the table. I went to the armoury, unlocked it, found my Colt revolver, checked it and loaded some ammunition into it. Through the cell bars I saw Joe slumped on the floor, his face swollen and bloody, his shirt stained. He looked up; one eye had closed over completely.

When I came off my horse and copped a bayonet in the face, it was only days after Ventersburg. My concentration had lapsed for a second and then I was just a bloodied bag of meat being carried off the field and put in a corner to die. Some part of me felt I deserved it, because I hadn’t saved that girl, because I was fighting on the side that looked away. Maybe getting injured was a just punishment.

The memory of her death came at me, over and over, and I still didn’t know how to think of it, so I tried not to think of it at all. Every time I saw her slight body flying through the air in that infinitesimal moment, a wall of roaring flame behind her, I’d quickly turn my thoughts away, block them, refuse them daylight. But they came to me at night and would not be denied, and I’d wake in terror. But rage was what I really felt. It sang through me, black and murderous.

I fetched the whisky and cigarettes, opened the cell door and placed them beside Joe, then held the revolver out. Our gazes held for a few seconds, then he took it. I locked the door and went out the back to the stables.

~

I found my own saddlebags, covered in dust, checked them for spiders and laid them over a rail. There was Felix’s saddle, his blanket, bridle and the rest of his kit. All of it needed endless upkeep in the dry air. I found a tin of neatsfoot oil and a rag from the back of the tack room cupboard and started rubbing the oil into the saddlebags, getting into every fold, under and over, rubbing, smearing and rubbing some more. I put it aside and took the bridle, undid the buckles, moistened the rag in oil and smeared and rubbed. Kept rubbing.

The smoke from last night’s fire hung like a fog in the still air. There was no one about. No one asking questions. Just a white cockatoo on the telegraph pole, gnawing at the wood, and he’d keep gnawing until the pole fell and we were, at last, cut off from civilisation.