Little Exiles. Robert Dinsdale

stitch in Jon’s side is severe. He presses his hands to it and crouches down. Ernest must be mistaken, either that or a fool. The men in black would never leave a gate wide open for any old boy to wander through. In Leeds, there were big black bars, with latches and locks and chains, all encased in ice.

      ‘Maybe it’s this way,’ says Ernest. He wanders on a few steps, and then a few more.

      As his footsteps fade, Jon looks behind. Though he can still see the border of the shadow wood, he cannot see beyond. Perhaps the wood itself is supposed to be the fence that should be keeping them in. In the summer, its walls will close and its traps will be sprung, but in the winter, the cracks appear and a boy might slip out.

      His eyes are lingering on the shadow wood when he hears Ernest cry out. To his later shame, he freezes, cannot even turn around.

      ‘Come on, boy,’ begins a deep, throaty voice, one Jon does not know. ‘You’ve come far enough.’

      ‘I …’

      It is Ernest, floundering for words. Jon Heather sinks into the dust, feels something scuttle over the tips of his fingers.

      ‘Let’s be having you, boy. It’s almost dark.’ The man’s voice seems to soften. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell him you were out before dark. It’s worse if you’re caught after.’

      Now there are footsteps again. Jon scrabbles sideways, desperate not to be in their path.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ Ernest begins, somewhere in the gloom. ‘I wanted to … see the fences.’

      They are almost upon Jon now. He crouches, listens for a footfall, and darts forward. In that way, a few yards at the time, he tracks back towards the Mission. The shadow wood is fading in front of him, swallowed up by the gathering night.

      ‘I promise I …’

      Ernest, Jon hears, has started to cry.

      ‘Save the tears, boy. It isn’t so bad. I could have left you out here, after all. It’ll be over soon, and then you can be a good boy again.’ He stops, the footsteps suddenly still. ‘But I can’t listen to your blubbering, boy.’ His voice hardens, yet it is barely a whisper. ‘So stop your crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.’

      Jon cannot bear to hear Ernest swallowing his tears, so he hurtles forward. He takes huge strides, desperate not to be heard, leaping over the plain until the scrub starts to thicken around him.

      He is almost at the edge of the plain, the eucalypts ranged in their ragged frontier in front of him, when he feels crunching under his feet. He stumbles. At his feet, there is a little cairn of bones: scrub chicken, if he is not mistaken. They are, he sees, not very old at all. He crouches down to peel a wing bone from his heel, and sees that the ground is scuffed up around him, as if some animal has made this its nest. But animals, Jon Heather notes, even Australian animals, don’t stop to build cairns out of their kills.

      He might wonder about it further, but he hears them again: the man in black, and Ernest’s little voice drowned out underneath. They might be anywhere behind him; the voices seem to curl from every direction, borne on flurries of desert sand. Perhaps, he begins to think, the men in black are their own kind of fence, watching out for boys slipping through to pick them up in the nothingness beyond.

      He crashes back through the shadow wood. Things skitter in the trees, but he pays them no mind. He only scrambles on, overjoyed to see the orbs of the border fires burning in the Mission beyond.

      The darkness is almost absolute when Jon Heather crashes back into the Mission. On the opposite side of the untilled field, the dairy sits empty but for the goats milling within. Further on, the first wave of boys is already emerging from the dining hall, bellies full of gristly goat. Jon hangs at a distance and sees George among them, hands shoved in pockets, head tucked into his chin. He wants to call out, run over and fling his arms around the fat boy, but instead he looks over his shoulder. Other figures have emerged from the shadow wood now: the man in black, with Ernest propelled in front of him. If Ernest has been crying, Jon cannot see. He waits until they pass, and then waits longer. He does not have to follow to know where they are going, but he follows all the same. Soon he is standing at the centre of the Mission, where the column of sandstone huts marks a big cross. The man in black takes Ernest through a door, and then they are gone.

      ‘Jon Heather, you missed dinner!’

      Jon turns to see George gambolling towards him.

      ‘Well?’

      ‘Well what?’

      ‘Well, why did you miss your dinner?’

      Jon wants to tell him. There’s nothing out there, George. There’s only more nothing, as far as the eye can see – nothing in the north and nothing in the south and nothing in the east and nothing in the west. That’s why they brought us here – a nothing place for nothing people.

      He wants to say all of this, but he cannot. He could never describe the yawning terror of standing there, knowing that, even if you ran and ran, you wouldn’t get any further away. There isn’t a boy who would believe it if he didn’t see it for himself.

      ‘What happened to your hands?’ George suddenly asks.

      Jon looks down. It still looks as if he is wearing scarlet gloves.

      ‘It’s nothing, Georgie. I was working.’

      ‘It’s nearly bedtime, you know …’

      Jon feels his feet rooted to the spot. ‘I’ll be along, George. I’ll catch you up.’

      George folds his arms. ‘What are you up to?’

      ‘It’s …’ Jon turns, feigns a big smile. ‘I didn’t finish my work,’ he lies. ‘They say I can’t go to bed until it’s done, or I’ll have to go for Judah Reed.’

      George’s lips curl. ‘Rotten old Judah Reed,’ he whispers, conspiratorially. ‘Can’t I help?’

      Eventually, George is convinced and scurries for the shelter of their dormitory. It would not do, he knows, to be caught out after dark, not with cottage mothers and men in black drifting around, looking for lurkers.

      Now that he is alone, Jon is suddenly afraid. He hears, dimly, one of the cottage mothers rounding up little ones as if they are stray chickens, clucking after them as she forces them up into their shacks. They will come for him soon enough, demanding to know why he has not also retired. If he was missed at dinner, somebody will know; somebody will ask questions, and he doesn’t know what he’ll say.

      Once silence has settled over the Mission, he hears the faint sound for which his ears have been straining. He drops to his haunches, eyes fixed on the sandstone door, and tracks along the wall, trying to discern the exact spot from which the noises come.

      Somewhere, in there, a boy is crying. It is, Jon Heather knows with a terrifying certainty, Ernest who is making those sounds.

      The noise comes in fits and starts. Ernest bleats out, and then there is silence; Ernest screams that he is sorry, and then he is still. Every time Jon thinks it is over, it comes again, and soon he begins to notice a pattern in the sound, a rhythm, as if Judah Reed is a conductor and Ernest his orchestra.

      Then, without warning, the sounds just stop. Jon listens out for them, realizes that he desperately wants to hear. As long as Ernest is crying, at least he knows Ernest is still alive. Yet now there is only silence: dull and absolute.

      Suddenly, the door twitches and opens. Jon springs to his heels, ready to dart into the stretching shadows, but he is too late. Ernest appears before him, the man in black hovering above.

      Judah Reed has a hand on each of the little boy’s shoulders, and he ruffles his hair as he sends him on his way. ‘You’ll be a good boy,’ he says, gently leading Ernest down the step and onto the bare earth. ‘Good boys make good men.’

      Ernest walks forward, stiff and deliberate.