AUSTRALIA  1999

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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

Heat waves roll off the bitumen, as off newly baked bread.  The road lined by mile upon mile of incessant red sand, stunted trees and carelessly flung boulders.  Yet, another desert.  He finds it horribly depressing.  It has a loneliness to it that brings sharply to mind what he has become.  Who he has become.

Something catches his eye; a sight so incongruous with his surrounds that Séamus Faolán McQuaid brakes hard.  Swinging his vehicle onto the shoulder of the road he is overtaken by a cloud of fine red dust.  He kills the motor and, for a moment, sits watching in complete and utter fascination.

A soft breeze fans his skin as he opens the door softly and climbs out.  He leans against the hot metal of the utility, vaguely conscious of a deep vacuum-filled silence, broken only by the shluurp shluurp of wings as two crows fly lazily overhead.  He watches sun-kissed hair flowing, skinny arms held high, legs beating a fast rhythm, and a smile 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 gum tree, ghostly white against the red sand, with thick branches spread wide like a mother hen’s wings, leans protectively over her.  Even so, a spot 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 are getting faster and faster… suddenly she is twirling towards him down the steep gradient; a spinning gyroscope caught in a moment of perfect balance. Then gravity takes hold.  A sudden uncoordinated tangle of feet.  She falls, rolling and rolling 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 shrieks of laughter.  Astounded, he watches her come to rest in a drift of sand, all arms and legs, brown as a chipmunk, blond hair tangled about her face, dress askew, panties showing.  She doesn’t 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 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 all he can do is absorb her.  She is sitting now, cross-legged, dusting herself off and picking twigs from her clothing. Her blond hair whips from side to side as she shakes her head, freeing it of sand.  She appears completely unconscious of his presence.

‘Top of the morning,’ he calls, fanning flies off his face with his hat.

She lifts her gaze to his.  Then rises swiftly to her feet.  He senses he would never catch her if she chose to run. ‘Canna help ya?’ 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. ‘Know where I can find Tom Crawford?’

She regards him through narrowed eyes. ‘Perhaps.’

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

‘A lift to town. That’s all.’

He regards the empty stretch of road he has just travelled and turns back to her with a worried 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?’

Yet again, the nonchalant lifting of her shoulders and a careless, ‘Ya know. Walked a little. Ran a little.’

‘For God’s sake,’ he blurts out,  ‘You’re by far too young to be wandering this godforsaken place on ye own.’ An image of his sister Meara flashes before his eyes.  The memory causes unsteady emotions to crystallize into a lump that lodges firmly in his throat.  Irritably, he turns away to stare at 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 softly with the distant cry of the birds.  Turning back to her he says, more harshly than he had intended, ‘Come, I’ll give ye that ride into the town.’

She darts off quick as a hare. He sees her stoop to a bush. She retrieves a school bag from beneath it and turns back to him. He strides down the hill and opens the van’s door for her.  She is close behind, swings her school bag onto the seat and pushes it into the seat well, then clambers in.

Back in the driver’s seat, Séamus 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 ahead. Gone is the vigour, the joyful abandon he had witnessed earlier.  He shoots a glance at the girl.  She is like a flower that has begun to wilt. He feels instant alarm and a strong reluctance to lose the carefree creature he had glimpsed back on the hill and so he attempts to make conversation; not something that comes naturally to him.

‘You seem to enjoy dancing?’

He thinks she says, “Yep” but her words are barely audible as she continues to stare out of the windscreen.

‘It’s a rather lonely place to dance,’ he suggests.

‘Don’t bother me.’

It should,’ he snaps, ‘and you shouldn’t accept lifts from strangers. Surely you realise the danger of it?’

She turns and looks at him, a slow smile enveloping her face.  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.  That there is nothing to fear except fear itself. He feels inadequate and ill-equipped to deal with this young person sitting next to 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 is handwritten 91. He smiles, wondering if the town’s population is still 4,791 in this year of 1999? He turns to 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 down the main street.

‘He rode with Captain Midnight.’

He thinks about this and 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.

It seems she is not prepared to let him get off lightly, as she gives him a sudden grin. ‘Know who Captain Midnight is?’

He bluffs it out. ‘For sure now and would he not be a 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 lips purse then twitch upwards, ‘Ah… so a bushranger is a bad thing, then? He is only half teasing.

‘Capitan Midnight was.  He was a horrible man.  Morgan too… well, maybe 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.

‘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, 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.  Then get out.

The town is a mirror image of other outback towns he has passed through in the last three days.  Clusters of buildings line the main street.  This one has a second-hand car yard called “Reliable Joe’s”.  A pub masquerading as a respectable hotel. There is a barber on one side, a hairdresser on the other.  Then, next to each other, a café, an ice-cream shop, a butcher and a baker.  At the end of the main street is the council chambers and the library beside a park.  Across from that is a sad looking supermarket in need of a good coat of paint and less of the garish posters that are 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. ‘Who owns the garage?’ he asks, suddenly realising he has not asked her name nor introduced himself to her.  His head had swivelled away from her as he turned to take another look but on hearing her reply ‘Tom Crawford’ his head jerks back to her.  He gets a prickling sensation down his neck. A coincidence, he wonders, or something more sinister at work?  It does not matter, it would be perfect he suddenly decides.

Once through the town centre, she directs him to a side street and to a church with lime-plastered walls. It has pretty stained-glass windows fronting the road and fancy ornate carved double doors under its sparkling white portico. He pulls up outside and cuts the engine. She sits, not attempting to get out, staring apprehensively at the church.

A large sign, standing tall on the strip of lawn in front of the church, reads: St Bernadette’s Loreto Convent School for Girls. The motto underneath states, in Latin, “Honour and God above all”.

‘Going to confession?’ he enquires with a teasing smile.

‘Wagging,’ she corrects. ‘Religious studies,’ she adds with conspiratorial grin, as if this explains everything.

For some reason he feels that he may have been wrong about her age. He had estimated her age at about  ten or eleven but there is a maturity about her that makes him suspect she must be older and so he asks her.

‘Thirteen going on fourteen,’ is her reply.  His astounded look 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, most reluctant to give out any information, even his age, but realises he has created this trap for himself so mutters, ‘Thirty,’ his tongue rolling around the “r” allowing her a glimpse of the Irish brogue he has taken such pains to put behind him.

She shakes her head incredulously. ‘No way.’

He is slightly put out. ‘Why, do I look older?’

‘Yes… no. Well, your eyes do.  My grandpa, he was in the war, ya know, he had sad eyes too.’

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 his hand.  ‘James MacFáelán.  It is grand meeting you.’

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

A snort of incredulity escapes him. ‘Bloody hell!’ He releases her hand. ‘Tom your dad, then?’

She nods, the smile getting broader.

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

She looks slightly guilty as 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 come to a line of red gums. Cross the bridge and turn into the road ‘longside the river. ‘ventually, you’ll reach 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 more like fourteen kilometres or so. ‘I sincerely hope your father isn’t anything like you, so I do.’

She giggles and opens the door, climbs out but almost immediately sticks her head back in. ‘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 slammed shut and walking briskly through the gate and down a stone-paved path towards the quadrangle of buildings at the back of the church.  Reaching over, 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 this town.’ She continues on her way with a cherry backward wave of her hand.

He watches her disappear around a corner; her words echoing in his ears, “Me dad practically owns this town”. He is beginning to realise Tom Crawford could be very useful to his mission.  Again, the prickling sensation as he wonders at the coincidence of it all.  Then, her other words eclipse the thought, “My grandpa was in the war, ya know, he had sad eyes too”.

On impulse, he tilts the rear-view mirror towards him and stares hard at his reflection. He sees hollow cheeks and restless eyes, the cold grey wildness of an Irish sea with the same desolate emptiness he doesn’t want to know about. He does indeed look years older.

He repositions the mirror and consoles himself with the thought that at least his hair is still thick and dark, 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 yet many a man would not consider Liam a hero. Quite the opposite.

Séamus does a U-turn and heads 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.  An emotional war that has him so screwed up he believes he would be impossible to untangle.

A few kilometres out of the town, he comes across a wedge-tail eagle plucking the eyes from a dead kangaroo. 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”.

At the thought of this an intense, bull like, anger sucks at his gut. He lowers his window, sticks his head out and yells obscenities at the bird. There is a flurry of wings as the eagle rises majestically above him. It circles high up, 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 over the trees.

‘Damn you! Devereaux,’ he yells after it. Damn you to hell. He feels the sting of tears and 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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