AUSTRALIA

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A longing comes upon him for the green hills of Ireland

Stone-walled cabins; warm loaves baking;

Of flocks in the plain; the deer of Innisfallen

A sight, so incongruous with his surrounds, has Séamus Faolán McQuaid braking hard and swerving onto the shoulder of the road.  He is overtaken by a cloud of fine red dust as he kills the motor and sits, taking in the scene before him.  Reaching for the door handle, he opens the door and climbs out.

A soft breeze fans his skin as he leans against the hot metal of the bonnet, acutely conscious of a deep vacuum-filled silence, broken only by the schlep schlep of wings as two crows fly lazily overhead and of the girl on the hill.  He stands spellbound watching sun-kissed hair swinging wildly, skinny arms weaving, body swaying to a rhythm heard only by the dancer, and a smile momentarily plays across his lips as he realises he has before him a desert faery, caught unaware, absorbed only in the freedom of her dance.

A tree, ghostly white against the red sand, its thick branches spread wide like the wings of a mother hen, leans protectively over her.  Even so, a ray of sun stabs at her through the tree’s sparse canopy, harsh as a spotlight on a stage.

Arms flowing… body dipping… swaying… feet shooting in and out with small intricate steps.  There is music in her movement: the jig of an Irish hornpipe, the flow of a violin, the sensual swoop of a cello… and so she holds him transfixed.

She brings to mind childhood stories around warm fires. One in particular – told to him by his father – of musicians having strayed near a faery mound who find themselves taken within to exchange tunes and songs. They emerge many years later, richly endowed with faery music, only to find they no longer have family or friends to welcome them home or to admire their newly found talent.  He had not fully appreciated the story at age seven.  Now, it evokes a keen sense of loss and he wonders, if having strayed near the mound of the faery, can he possibly be worse off?

Her steps get faster and faster… suddenly she is whirling down the steep gradient; a spinning gyroscope caught in a momentum of perfect balance. Then gravity takes hold.  She falls, rolling unhindered down the small hill.  He bolts across the road and leaps the ditch… only to pause on the other side, stopped in his tracks by her shrieks of laughter.  Arrested, he watches her come to an untidy heap in a drift of sand, all arms and legs, brown as a chipmunk, blond hair tangled about her face, dress askew, undies on display.  She doesn’t seem to give a damn.  She’s alive.  She’s having fun.

Fun?

The realisation is like a garrotte around his chest, squeezing and chocking him. When last had he seen someone having fun.  When last had he experienced such unrestrained abandon?  When, in his sad world, had anyone taken time to enjoy life; to just enjoy?

He steps cautiously through the mulga scrub, his gaze polarized on the laughing girl. This creature before him – this unencumbered spirit – has induced all manner of inner turmoil and he finds himself absorbing her like a desert traveller alighting upon an oasis.  She is sitting cross-legged, dusting herself off, picking twigs from her clothing, her blond hair whips from side to side as she shakes her head, freeing it of sand.  She is completely unconscious of his presence.

‘Morning,’ he calls, fanning flies off his face with his hat, as he approaches.

She springs to her feet and he senses she would be fast as a hare if she were to take off. ‘Morning.’ Her tone is guarded, her body language defensive.

He is about to say, I only came to see if you were all right, then changes his mind, instinctively feeling she would laugh off his concern with a dismissive nonchalance. ‘Know where I can find Tom Crawford?’ he asks, instead.

She regards him through narrowed eyes. ‘Per…haps.’ She draws the word out slowly.

He recognises the calculating look. ‘Sounds like it’s going to cost me?’

‘A lift to town. That’s all.’

He looks back at the empty stretch of road winding through mile upon mile of incessant red sand, stunted trees and carelessly flung boulders.  Heat waves roll off the bitumen as off newly baked bread.  He turns back to her with a deep frown. ‘For sure now, is that wise?  You don’t know me from Adam.’

She gives an exaggerated shrug.

He feels instant alarm on her behalf and asks, sharply, ‘How did you get here?’  He waves a hand vaguely about him indicating the isolation and the vast emptiness with not a hint of a bloody building in sight.

Another nonchalant lift of her shoulders, ‘Ya know. Walked a little. Ran a little.’

‘For God’s sake,’ he snaps, ‘you’re far too young to be wandering this godforsaken place on ye own.’ An image of his sister Meara, at that age, flashes before his eyes.  The memory crystallizes into a hard lump inside his chest.  His eyes sweep past her to the red sand stretching to infinity and beyond. ‘Sweet, Jesus,’ he murmurs, ‘what godforsaken place have I arrived in this time?

‘Morgan’s Creek.’

Her words mingle with the distant cry of birds, bringing his gaze back to her.  He says, more harshly than intended, ‘Come on then, I’ll give ye a ride into the bloody town.’

She darts off up the hill, swooping upon the base of the tree to retrieve a school bag and bounds back towards him. He turns and strides across the road to the van and holds open the door for her.  She slides past him, swings her school bag onto the seat and clambers in.  Slamming her door shut, Séamus walks to the driver’s side, wrenches open the door and gets in.  He is frowning deeply as he starts the engine and flattens the accelerator, wheel-spinning the vehicle back onto the tar and enveloping it in swirls of fine desert sand.

The van’s cabin flexes and pings in the heat as they eat up the kilometres.  She sits silently, staring straight ahead.  Gone is the vigour, the joyful abandon he had witnessed earlier.  He shoots a glance at the girl, suddenly conscious of his ill-tempered mood and the obvious effect it’s having on her. She’s like a flower that has begun to wilt. He feels instant alarm; a strong reluctance, verging on panic, not wanting to lose the carefree creature he had glimpsed back on the hill and so he attempts to make amends though light-hearted conversation; not something that comes naturally to him.

‘Do you enjoy dancing?’

“Yep”.  Her words are barely audible as she continues to gaze out of the windscreen.

Questions crowd his mind. How did she get to that lonely spot? Why that hill to dance on?  How had she intended to get back into town?  Is she in the habit of hitching a ride?  He shudders at the thought. ‘You’ve chosen a rather lonely place to dance,’ he suggests, sensing she would clam up if he were to bombard her with his concerns.

‘Maybe to you it seems lonely.  Don’t bother me,’ she mutters.

It should,’ he snaps,’ his temper instantly arising at her complete disregard of her situation.  Surely you realise the danger of accepting lifts from strangers?’

A slow smile envelops her face.  She turns to him.  ‘I saw ya all along, back there, ya know.  Don’t worry, I’m a good judge of people and I can take care of meself.’

Her eyes are the translucent colour of a dewdrop.  The look she bestows upon him is all knowing, as if, in her short lifespan, she has been blessed with a full understanding of the universe and beyond.  There is nothing to fear except fear itself, the look informs him.

He feels inadequate and ill-equipped to deal with this young person sitting next to him and so turns his gaze back to the road.  But he, who has never bothered with small-talk and who finds silence preferable to inane chatter, suddenly finds that he does not want to lose this carefree girl to the muteness of two strangers, who have nothing in common; that he desperately wants to cling to the vision he saw on the hill and so he says, ‘I wrote a poem once, in a faraway place, in another life when I was in a more philosophical frame of mind around leadership and independence.  I called it, Born to Dance.’

‘Let’s hear it, then,’ she says, somewhat sceptically.

He instantly shakes his head, having no idea now why he brought the poem up, but on flicking a glance at her he sees the dimpled half smile, the challenge in her expressive eyes, perhaps not believing that inside someone like him there could reside a poet of any importance. ‘Okay then,’ he says determinedly, rising to the challenge.

He inhales deeply, taking his mind back to that place and the situation that had so moved him to write it.  ‘When did I stop dancing?” he asks softly.

“Why do we no longer enter the city to dance through the streets?
When will we remove our suits,
and be seen amongst many.

‘When will we realize we have it all backwards?

‘How many mistakes,
will it take to awaken us to the meaning of it,
the reason why,
because that’s what we want,

‘isn’t it?
A reason?

‘A reason to act,
a reason to breathe,
an explanation for all that is bad,
and gratification for all that is good.

‘When will we realize,
that the little girl called Feyth,
knew what she was doing.
When she started dancing in the streets.

‘And the other children watched her dance,
dropped their toys,
and danced along.

‘The parents closed their mouths and found their feet.
Passing strangers stopped and stared.

‘And inevitably started to move,
started to groove.

‘Businessmen, stared out the windows,
laid down their papers and erupted into the street.

‘And Feyth continued to dance.
Not because of their involvement,
because Feyth was doing what she was made to do,
she was created to dance.’

He holds his breath, expecting the worst for his poor attempt at poetry.

‘I’m Feyth,’ she says simply, her smile delighted, ‘I was born to dance.’

‘I believe you were,’ he laughs, inordinately pleased by her lack of criticism and to have brought life back into this wild creature beside him.

A while later they come to a sign that reads: Welcome to the Frontier Town of Morgan’s Creek. Pop. 4,789.

A red line has been drawn through the last two numbers and above them is a handwritten 91.  He smiles, realising the impossibility of keeping a sign like that up-to-date and wondering if the town’s population is still 4,791?  He turns back to the girl.

‘Where do I drop you off?’

‘Other side of town.’

‘Who’s Morgan?’ he asks, sizing up the dog-eared town unravelling before him.

‘He rode with Captain Midnight.’

He wonders if he dare ask who Captain Midnight might be. But decides against it as it will only show her how very ignorant he is on the subject of Australian history.

She flicks him a smug grin and it seems she is not prepared to let him off so lightly. ‘Know who Captain Midnight is?’

He bluffs it out. ‘For sure now and would he not be that famously decorated Captain in the Australian army?’

Her face contorts and she bursts into delighted giggles.

‘What’s so bloody funny?’

‘Captain Midnight was a bushranger,’ she chortles.

His raises an eyebrow, ‘Ah… so a bushranger is a bad thing, then?

He is only half teasing.

‘Of course! Capitan Midnight was.  He was a horrible man.  Morgan too… well, not quite so bad,’ she amends.  ‘He was a very good rider.  He stole the best thoroughbred horses in the district.  There’s a store beside the river where travellers stopped for refreshment. That’s where Morgan would rob them.

He snorts. ‘I would have thought robbing people from the same spot time and time again would have been his undoing?’

She shakes her head vigorously. ‘He wasn’t like the other bushrangers. He dressed like a gentleman in fine clothes and rode thoroughbreds so the travellers took him for one of them.  Me dad says Morgan was a master of disguises.’

A town named after a rebel. He grins widely, beginning to feel a certain affinity for the place.  Maybe he could get used to Morgan’s Creek after all.  It is a thought not entirely devoid of cynicism.  He is here to do a job.  That is all.  His only reason for being in this godforsaken place.

Morgan’s Creek is a mirror image of the other outback towns he has passed through in the last three days.  An oddment of buildings lines the main street.  Apart from the usual retails shops of fashion and knick-knacks there is a second-hand car yard called, Reliable Joe’s; a turn-of-the-century pub masquerading as a respectable hotel; an old fashioned barber shop on one side, a fashionable hairdresser next door, across from them a café, an ice-cream shop, a butcher and a baker.  At the end of the main street, towards the river and in the shade of leafy green trees, lies the council chambers and the library building, incorporated within a park.  The shabby supermarket, so essential to any town, is in need of a good coat of paint and less of the garish posters plastered over every square inch of its plate glass window.

They pass a garage with two pumps and a workshop. It has a “To Let” sign that catches his eye. He slows to a crawl, thinking rapidly, an idea forming with the lighting speed his training has him operating under, in any given circumstances.

‘Who owns the garage?’ he asks, his attention still on the building.  On hearing her reply his head snaps back to her.  ‘Tom Crawford?’ he queries, wondering if he’d heard her correctly.  At her hesitant nod, he gets a prickling sensation down his neck. A coincidence, he wonders, or something more sinister at work?

Thoughtfully, his eyes return to the road ahead.  It doesn’t matter which it is, it would be the perfect cover, he suddenly decides.  Once through the town centre, she directs him to a side street and points to a church with cool lime-plastered walls.

He pulls up outside and cuts the engine. It has pretty stained-glass windows and fancy ornate carved double doors under its sparkling white portico. With its beautiful garden it’s a haven of tranquility in an otherwise hot little town.

She sits, not attempting to get out, staring apprehensively out of the side window at the church.  A large sign stands prominent on the strip of lawn in front of the church.  He reads: St Bernadette’s Loreto Convent School for Girls. The motto underneath, in Latin, proudly proclaims, “Honour and God above all”.

‘Going to confession?’ he inquires with a teasing lift of his mouth.

She snorts.  ‘Confession is on Friday this is Wednesday.  I’m wagging.  Religious studies,’ she adds, as if this explains everything.  She reaches for her school bag and throws him a conspiratorial grin.  ‘Thanks, for the ride.’

He suddenly realises he has no idea what her name is or how old she is. His first impression had him estimating her age at ten or eleven, due mainly to her elf-like physique, so graceful and fine boned, but he realises now there is a maturity about her that makes him suspect she must be older and so he asks.

She grins that challenging grin of hers and replies, ‘Fourteen… in a few weeks.’  His astounded expression makes her add quickly, ‘Don’t worry, everyone gets it wrong. Me dad says I’ll be grateful when I’m older. What about you?’

He hesitates, not accustomed to giving out information on himself, but realises, by asking her for information, it is only fair to return the favour. ‘Close on thirty,’ he mutters, his tongue rolling around the “r” allowing her a glimpse of the Irish brogue he’s taken such pains to hide most of his adult life.

She shakes her head incredulously. ‘No way.’

He is slightly put out. ‘What do mean, “no way”?’

‘You look… well… older.  At least your eyes do.  My grandpa, he had sad eyes too.  But, he was in the war and he saw things that made him… unhappy.’

He nods thoughtfully.  ‘We’re from different worlds, you and me.  My world made me grow old.  It seems yours keeps you young.  He holds out a hand.  ‘James MacFáelán. It’s grand meeting you.’

Her grin is all-encompassing as she places her hand in his and shakes it firmly. ‘Charlea with an “ea”, Crawford.’

He releases her hand as if stung and a snort of incredulity escapes him. ‘Bloody hell! Tom your dad, then?’

She nods, letting out an amused chuckle.

‘Is that so?  Well now, Miss Charlea Crawford, perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me where I can find your father at this time of day, eh?’

She gives him directions. It appears he will need to go back the way they have just come, past the place where he found her. ‘Ya’ll reach a line of red gums. Cross the bridge and turn into the road longside the river. Eventually you’ll see two myall wood gateposts. The sign says Crawford. Ya can’t miss it.’

He shakes his head, realising the young waif has dragged him some fair distance in the opposite direction to where he needed to go. In fact, by the time he turns around and heads back, it will be close on fourteen kilometres or so. ‘I sincerely hope your father isn’t anything like you, so I do,’ he grimaces, ‘or he’ll be a hard man to negotiate business with.’

She giggles, opens the door and climbs out, but almost immediately sticks her head back through the open doorway. ‘Me dad is keen on dogs and horses. He also flies a plane. If you like any of them things, he’ll take to you, no problem.’

Then she is gone, door firmly shut, walking briskly through the gate and down a stone-paved path towards the quadrangle of buildings at the back of the church.  He winds down the passenger window and calls after her, ‘Hope you don’t get into too much trouble.’

‘Na,’ she flings back over her shoulder. ‘Me dad practically owns the school.’ She continues on her way with a cherry backward wave of her hand.

He watches her disappear around a corner of the building; her words echoing in his ears, “Me dad practically owns the school”.  Again, the prickling sensation as he wonders at the coincidence of it all.  Then, her earlier words come back to him, “My grandpa, he had sad eyes too.  But, he was in the war and he saw things that made him… unhappy”.

On impulse, he tilts the rear-view mirror and looks hard at his reflection. Restless eyes stare back at him, the cold grey wildness of an Irish sea with the same desolate emptiness he’s seen in others and hoped it wouldn’t happen to him. He does indeed look years older.

Repositioning the mirror, Séamus consoles himself with the thought that at least his short-cropped hair is still thick and without the streaks of premature grey that have crept upon his brother Liam.  Mind you, at forty-two, Liam has experienced things few men would ever experience outside a war zone. He wears his scars like badges of honour and yet many a man would not consider Liam a hero. Quite the opposite.

Séamus starts the van and does a U-turn, heading back through the town but his mind won’t let go. “My grandpa was in the war, ya know”. Damn it all, so was he, from the age of seven onwards.  An emotional war that has him so screwed up he believes he would be impossible to untangle.  He pity’s any woman who wishes to do so.

A few kilometres out of the town, he comes across a wedge-tail eagle plucking the eyes from a dead kangaroo.  It’s a magnificent bird with powerful legs, hairy as a bear’s, a curved beak and piercing black eyes. There had once been eagles in Ireland. Not anymore. One day, will people say that of the Irish, he wonders? “Not anymore”.

This thought sucks at his gut in an intense, bull like, anger.  He lowers his window, sticks his head out and yells at the bird, not wanting it to end up like the kangaroo.  Dead.  Huge wings flap effortlessly as the eagle rises majestically into the sky.  It circles above him, obviously preparing to return to its feed the moment it is safe to do so.

‘Death, you can’t fucking get away from it,’ he snarls, banging the side of the truck a resounding thump, the sound reverberating like a gunshot across the flat landscape. The eagle spins away, soaring through the cloudless sky.

‘Damn you! Devereaux,’ he yells after it. Damn you to hell. He drives furiously on. Even now, the memory chills his heart and plays havoc with his emotions but he will do this to save Meara.  Only for Meara, he decides grimly.

Chapter 2…

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