24

The sky was just beginning to lighten when I opened my eyes to see her crouching at the entrance, her back towards me and her head bowed. ‘Nell?’

She swivelled round to face me and I saw the baby cradled in her skirts. It was swathed in a filthy shawl, its head hidden deep in the folds, but its smooth brown legs stuck out beyond the hem, kicking stiffly to the jittery rhythms of my pulse.

‘Where did you find it?’ I asked.

She looked at me with a strange, sly smile. ‘I thought you knew,’ she said. ‘The child’s ours.’ She loosened the shawl around the baby’s head and tilted the face towards me. ‘Can’t you tell?’

I strained forward, trying to make out the features, but could see only the sheen of the brown skin. Then Eleanor slid her hand beneath the folds and slipped the shawl right back to the shoulders so that the wicked little face came clear, its glittering eyes staring back at me from beneath the high, domed brow. I knew then that it wasn’t a baby at all, and wanted to tell Eleanor so, but she was gazing down at it with such rapt adoration that I hadn’t the heart to say anything.

After a while she raised her head again. ‘Would you like to hold her?’ she asked.

I drew back, feeling the bile rise in my throat, but she thrust the bundle towards me. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Take her.’ It was impossible to refuse. I held out my arms and, as I did so, the thing lunged at me. I felt its wet mouth clamp on the flesh at the base of my thumb, and its tongue, rough as a cat’s, begin to rasp the skin. ‘Little mischief,’ said Eleanor softly, ‘she’s hungry.’ She tugged the creature away and returned it, kicking and squirming, to her lap; then she undid the buttons of her blouse and laid bare her left breast.

‘Look at her face,’ she said. ‘She knows what she wants.’ She lifted the creature and settled its head in the crook of her arm. I saw its mouth widen to receive the nipple, and I cried out a warning, starting forward and scrambling across the sandy floor; but Eleanor twisted quickly round and, without a word or a backward glance, rose lightly to her feet and walked away.

‘Bullen,’ I whispered. ‘Bullen, did you see her?’ I knelt at his side and shook him gently by the shoulder.

It was the first time I had touched a corpse, but I could tell at once what I was dealing with. Bullen was lying on his side with his face turned away from me and half buried in the folds of his blanket. Sleeping peacefully, I might have said from the look of him, but my fingertips knew better, and my heart contracted in terror. I remember staggering from the lean-to and stumbling barefoot down the path, as though I might find help out there; then my guts clenched in spasm and before I could get my fingers to my belt, I had fouled myself.

We deceive ourselves constantly, in ways at once so subtle and so fundamental that only the sharpest of blows can bring us to our senses. Until that moment I had been a hero or, to put it more accurately, I had been playing the role of one of the heroes of my childhood reading, battling gamely against a dangerous but ultimately tameable universe. I don’t mean that I hadn’t been frightened, but my fear had been tempered by the unspoken assumption of my own invincibility. Now, weak and giddy, lost in that vast wilderness like a glass bead dropped in a cornfield, I felt myself jarred into some new and terrible understanding. Nothing clear, nothing readily explicable; not strictly an illumination, but a tremulous recognition of the darkness that lies concealed beneath our intricately woven fictions. I stood shivering in my soiled breeches and howled at the sky.

I must have cut an abject figure, yet I would have given anything just then, out there in that inhuman solitude, to have been gazed upon by human eyes. I don’t know how long I stood there, but after a while it came to me that I should wash myself down. I made my way slowly to the edge of the swampland and stripped off my clothes; then I squatted above the stagnant seepage and cleaned the filth from my legs as best I could.

Each small action seemed to require an inordinate effort, and by the time I had ferreted out my spare clothes and put them on, the chill had gone from the morning. The still air in the lean-to was growing heavy: a sweetish smell of excrement, a darker undertone of decay. I dosed myself with the last of the paregoric, draining the bottle dry, and then turned my attention to Bullen.

Certain ideas are so firmly established in our minds that it is almost impossible to eradicate them. I realised at once that I possessed neither the tools nor the physical resources to bury the body, yet I found myself unable to dislodge the conviction that it was my duty to do so. After a moment or two of confused deliberation, I knelt at Bullen’s side, gripping his shoulder with one hand and laying the other on his bony hip; and it was only when I felt the body’s stiff resistance to my tentative coaxing that the sheer absurdity of the enterprise was borne home to me. I sat back on my heels and felt the heat rising through my own body, licking upward like an unguarded flame.

‘Burn it,’ she said.

I started and swung round, expecting to see her there at the entrance again, but there was no sign of her. Yet the voice had been as clear as if she had been standing at my shoulder. I stumbled outside and looked up and down the track.

‘Nell,’ I called, and my voice came ringing back to me from the cliffs, mingled with hers. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Do it now.’

I ducked back into the lean-to and gathered up my belongings, stuffing them haphazard into my pack; then I spread my blanket and piled on to it the wallaby skins and bird carcasses, a foul jumble of sticky fur and dulled feathers. I folded the blanket over them and roped it up to form a loose bale. The effort left me trembling and breathless, and while I was resting she drew close again, so close that I could feel her voice resonating in the aching hollow of my own throat.

‘You can’t carry these things,’ she said, and I felt her hand pass across my face, light as breath and moving with such expressive delicacy that the tears sprang to my eyes. ‘You don’t have the strength.’

‘I’m only taking what needs to be taken.’

Some faint stir in the air around me signalled disapproval. ‘Let it burn,’ she said. ‘Everything.’

I remember the anger rising in me then, anger at her persistence, at her unwanted interference in my affairs. ‘It’s not your business,’ I shouted, tugging at the bale, manoeuvring it clumsily towards the entrance. But as I cried out, something flared and roared – whether within me or around I couldn’t tell – and I staggered and fell heavily against the wall of the shelter. Then I knew that I should have to do as she said.

There was no shortage of tinder – the ground inside and around the shelter was littered with eucalyptus leaves – but in my weakened state I took some time to gather all I needed. Little by little I raised a small mound of the brittle debris at the entrance before transferring it, in rustling handfuls, to the space between Bullen’s body and the brushwood wall.

I struck a match and leaned over and, as I did so, I was seized by anxiety. Was some ritual required? Some form of words? If you had asked me six months earlier, posing the question in theoretical form, I should doubtless have said that the freed soul has no need of ceremony and that – supposing such a place or state to exist – it will find its way to heaven unaided. Now, stooped above Bullen’s earthly remains, I was tormented by the fancy that some omission on my part might doom his spirit to an eternity of aimless wandering among the trees and lowering crags. I blew out the match and began to pray, cobbling together such phrases as I could remember from the prayer book with others of my own invention. When I ran out of words, I took a handful of leaves and scattered them over the body.

Whether because of the trembling of my hands or the faint dampness still in the leaves at that early hour, I found it more difficult than I had anticipated to ignite the heap. The oils would flare and sputter at the touch of the match and then, almost as suddenly, the flame would die back along the blackened edges of the leaves. After the third attempt, I sat back on my heels and drew out my pocket-book. I tore half a dozen pages from the back and twisted them loosely, one by one, inserting them at intervals along the base of the heap. And as I did so, Daniel’s mournful face slipped from between the pages and fluttered to the ground.

Nothing could have prepared me for the violence of her intervention, the terrible jolt of anger she sent through me as I stared down at the photograph. She said nothing, nothing at all, but her intention was as plain as if she had screamed the words in my ear. I picked up the little scrap and placed it on the pyre. Then I struck another match and set it to the twists of paper, coaxing each in turn into flickering life.

That did the trick. The flames licked up the heap and began to eat at the base of the wall so that the brushwood crackled and spat. I piled on more debris, but there was no need. I felt the heat strike upwards as the fire took hold, and I withdrew from the shelter and moved upwind of the blaze, my eyes smarting.

I might attribute my languor to sickness, or to the effects of the opium; or it may have been that the flames offered a spectacular and welcome diversion from darker thoughts. Whatever the reason, I stood gazing in a kind of trance as the blaze intensified, and it was only when the breeze stiffened and veered, scattering sparks and burning leaves in my direction, that I saw with any degree of clarity the implications of my action. ‘Nell,’ I whispered, thinking she might have further instructions for me, but I could hear nothing through the roar of the burning brushwood.

It was the smell of scorched flesh and feathers, reaching me as the wall lurched inward and the roof subsided, that spurred me into action. I stumbled to the track and set off in the direction of a civilisation whose very existence in this wild and remote corner of the earth seemed suddenly questionable.