Free Bring Larks and Heroes by Thomas Keneally Page B

shirt.
    â€˜Hold hard!’ they all said.
    But he was not going to be made ashamed before them. He approached the orderly, who looked piteous in his shirt, shaking his little scarified head, blinking.
    â€˜I have a warrant for somebody here,’ he said.He made a few parade-ground threats, the sort of thing nobody believes in anyhow.
    Time to see things straight again was what the orderly needed. He stood shaking his head, making a speech to himself, but couldn’t see Halloran. Meanwhile, the woman remained flat on her back, doing nothing about her sad, angular nakedness. The orderly’s sweat and her own lay round her throat, on her breasts, in the pit of her navel. There was a peculiar stiff questingness about her raised head which Halloran saw but could not interpret, until one of his Marines said, ‘God she’s blind!’
    â€˜Having a try yourself, General?’ called the Welshman when Halloran knelt on one knee beside the woman. She stank, which was no novelty. Over her odious and unwelcoming body he made a poor attempt to pull down the shift. She ground her gums and struck his arm away and laughed drily, as if she had just then got a picture of the proceedings. She was perhaps thirty, utterly desert; her laughter was the dry-leaves laughter of very old women. She had no teeth at all to modulate it. It prolonged itself, regardless of the demands of breathing, until her face was blue. Then she took a great swallow of air and started to laugh again. The others laughed too.
    â€˜Whore’s got her pride, General,’ called the Welshman.
    â€˜Get dressed!’ Halloran told the orderly.
    One of the patients threw the man a pair of trousers, and he throttled them and put them on. But he was still dazed and still had odd-ends of words to say to himself. In the end, he turned to Halloran and said, full of business, ‘Who’s your warrant for?’
    Halloran pulled the warrant out of his pocket and found the peasant name amidst the classic gardens of verbiage.
    â€˜Eris Mealey,’ he read.
    â€˜I thought so,’ said the orderly, very gratified about the eyes. ‘You can’t have him. His back’s gone rotten. Daker’s left a letter you can take to the Governor.’
    â€˜But I’m supposed to hand this to Daker himself.’
    â€˜Daker’s somewhere out in the hills trapping birds.’
    â€˜When will he be back?’
    â€˜Tomorrow afternoon.’
    â€˜What about the hospital?’
    â€˜Hospital looks after itself. You just take this letter and keep your nose out.’
    He led Halloran resentfully to the end of the building, to the surgeon’s office, an eaves-high partition of wood with a locked door. The orderly opened it with a key which, clearly, he kept tied round his neck no matter what the occasion. Inside was a table and chair and two hospital registers in suede covers bearded with dust. There was a letter also, which said in a tiny hand that it was from Surgeon Daker,Magistrate and Medical Superintendent, the Crescent, To His Excellency the Colonial Governor, concerning the Irish felon, Eris Mealey. Halloran read all this and pocketed it.
    â€˜Mealey was flogged?’ asked Halloran. ‘You said his back was rotten.’
    â€˜I said his back was rotten,’ the orderly repeated in Halloran’s rather moist East coast accent. ‘See for yourself!’ He pointed to the corner across from the office.
    Halloran peered, the other two peered. What’s it like to have death on your back, death triumphant already? the three of them thought. Show us, in your face, why you can’t will your back unrotten again.
    Naked and stomach-down on a pallet by the wall, with his own water bucket by him, Mealey seemed to have a heavy shadow on his back and buttocks and upper legs. The smell of him, the mass of the smell and its tart edge of dreadful sweetness, stood out above the routine stenches of