Free Tourmaline by Randolph Stow Page B

diviner poured some of the stuff on Byrne’s upturned face, and watched with remote interest as a thin line of it flowed down the gaunt and cratered cheek. Then he cut a piece of plaster with his knife and strapped up the wound. Then he said: ‘Got a handkerchief? Wipe your eye before you open it.’
    Byrne did so. When he stood away from the bar, he lurched. The crack on the head had finished him off, apparently.
    ‘Put me to bed,’ he requested, indistinctly. ‘Mike——’
    ‘Okay,’ said the charitable diviner, looking at Kestrel. ‘Which way?’
    Kestrel took a lamp from under the bar and lit it, and gave it to him with a nod towards the far door. ‘Along the veranda,’ he said. ‘Last room.’
    So the diviner hauled Byrne’s arm over his shoulder, took the lamp in his free hand and said: ‘Good night.’
    ‘Goo’ night,’ said Byrne, amiably.
    Locked together, they staggered away.
    As they clumped down the veranda Byrne asked in an injured tone: ‘What d’you want to hurt me for, Mike? What for?’
    ‘All right, all right,’ said the diviner. ‘We’ve all heard you. Is this the room?’
    It was. The diviner set down the lamp on a hard kitchen chair and hoisted Byrne on to the bed; where he lay unmoving, with his black eyes fixed on the diviner’s face.
    ‘Are you right now?’ the diviner asked him.
    He thought about it, and said: ‘Got to take my boots off. Deborah goes crook.’ So the diviner performed that small service.
    ‘Okay now?’
    ‘Don’t go yet,’ Byrne said, or pleaded. ‘Sit down for a bit.’
    The diviner seated himself rather gingerly on the bed, and let his flaking countenance be gazed upon.
    ‘Ah, mate,’ said Byrne at last, with a long sigh, and took the diviner’s hand. He was thoroughly maudlin.
    The diviner drew back involuntarily, but conquered the temptation in an instant and bent over Byrne with savage eyes. The yellow lamplight gave those eyes a greenish tinge, more sea-like than ever. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he demanded, softly, but with an angry insistence. ‘Why are you like this?’
    ‘I’m damned, Mike,’ said Byrne, crying. ‘I’m damned.’ It was very curious. His father had been a Catholic; but that Byrne should have remembered anything of him was barely possible, one would have thought. ‘Don’t go yet.’
    ‘I won’t go,’ said the diviner, with his fingers biting into Byrne’s lean shoulders. ‘Not till you drop this crap you’re giving me. What’s up?’
    ‘You wouldn’t know,’ Byrne said, tragically.
    ‘No,’ the diviner agreed. ‘Not without you telling me.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter, Mike.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter a cracker to me. But it does to you, plain enough.’
    ‘I’m drunk,’ Byrne said.
    ‘I know you are.’
    ‘I’ll be right in the morning. I’ll work for you. Up at the mine.’
    ‘You’re a good bloke,’ said the diviner, rather grudgingly.
    Then Byrne reached up with both arms and hugged him in a rib-cracking embrace. It was one of those funny, embarrassing, touching gestures to which some drunken men are prone, when the last barriers are down and they stand revealed, quite naked, in their loneliness. And the diviner bore it very well. But he asked, after a while: ‘Can I go now?’
    ‘Yair,’ said Byrne, ‘go now. I’ll see you in the morning.’
    So the diviner rose and went, with an uncertain expression about his mouth. And Byrne’s dark face turned on the pillow to watch him, and his black eyes were fixed on the door long after he had disappeared.

FIVE
    In the morning Charlie Yandana came and squatted outside my door; and as on that day I was feeling well-disposed, I went out and spoke to him. I asked what news he had. He thought for a while, and said that Byrnie was drunk and singing all last night.
    I said I had heard him.
    Charlie had an odd sympathy for Byrne. ‘Byrnie went up the mine ’s morning,’ he informed me, as his next item of interest. ‘New