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  When Colts Ran

  ePub ISBN 9781742741505

  Also by Roger McDonald:

  Fiction

  1915

  Slipstream

  Rough Wallaby

  Water Man

  The Slap

  Mr Darwin’s Shooter

  The Ballad of Desmond Kale

  Non-Fiction

  Shearers’ Motel

  The Tree In Changing Light

  A Vintage book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Vintage in 2010

  This edition published in 2011

  Copyright © Roger McDonald 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  McDonald, Roger, 1941–. When colts ran/Roger McDonald.

  ISBN 978 1 86471 044 1 (pbk).

  A823.3

  Cover photo © Photolibrary/Peter J. Robinson

  Cover design by Christabella Designs

  Typeset and eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Peaseblossom Ready.

  Cobweb And I.

  Moth And I.

  Mustardseed And I.

  All Where shall we go?

  – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene I

  ONE

  CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT BOYS THREW back bedsheets and sat in a window chasing coolness, cupping cigarettes in their palms, hanging over boarding house balustrades. The night was blackout black as they whispered a vow – if any of the younger boys narked, they would kill them.

  The four monkey-scrambled down a fire escape and off through descending leafy streets. The first was Kingsley Colts accompanied by stray cats at ground level, flying foxes overhead. When Colts ran the ghost of himself led on, always too far ahead, always out of reach – a boy counting telephone poles and lumpy cracks in the bitumen in lucky odds and evens.

  Squawks and crashes of fruit bats in the figs were the only sounds except for the wet slap of sandshoes. They passed Royal Sydney Golf Club and came to the seawall at Rose Bay, sharing another fag, shielding it under their shirts. They could do nothing, it seemed, without a puff.

  Breasting water, they sidestroked to a moored launch with their clothes fisted above their heads. There was a low humid sky, the feel of rain. Once reed beds grew in the bay, dugongs fed in the shallows, lights of fishermen were fireflies and the smell of bushfire smoke drifted over the water. Now military craft choked the harbour: torpedo boats, destroyers, gun barges, ferries converted to barracks, tethered Catalina flying boats. Outlines of shipping rose and fell. Sentries watched but the low-slung launch with its rumbling inboard motor slid past unchallenged.

  ‘So much for national defence,’ said Colts, eyes down at water level sweeping the dark. It was the way his guardian, Major Dunc Buckler, snorted the phrase.

  ‘Colts,’ the others growled back at him, ‘shut your bloody cakehole.’

  Colts stood in the scuppers spreading his arms in the dark, creating a willing target.

  They travelled the length of the harbour past Garden Island docks, under the walls of the tram depot at Bennelong Point, below the high span of Sydney Harbour Bridge where they circled awe-struck and idled the motor. Nobody saw them or cared enough to shout warning – it was perfectly infuriating to be so powerfully ignored.

  Since the Japanese war started Colts hadn’t seen Dunc Buckler, only had letters with marginal cartoons of soldiers around cooking pots, men shooting crows with guns that went pop, drawings of box-shaped Blitz wagons in the background, their radiators geysering steam. Buckler was posted to the interior of Australia, where there weren’t any bullets flying, but that would change when the army bosses got smart about him and stopped belittling him with the real war going on without him.

  The boys tilted their heads back.

  ‘Look at that, willya?’

  The bridge’s arch bulked over them, riveted in grey. They stood in the wallowing hull, backs turned to each other, aiming out in the water as far as they could reach. Mist trailed down and stroked their faces. To see a road and railway high in cloud was to be drawn to a life reversed from the one they knew – where authority would flow to their knuckles, money to their pockets and distances unravel under their boots.

  Colts whispered he wanted to scramble up the granite piles and crawl over the half-moon of towering steel protected by radiating spikes. ‘Bullo to that,’ said the others, ready to chuck it in. Colts passed round a corncob pipe stuffed with bitter shag. His temerity was exhausting. Old boys of their school had won medals in Libya, in Greece, had fought in Malaya, their names asterisked on the honour board in gold. Let me go free, Colts prayed to the gods of civilised restraint who bound him. Everything was in his circumstances, all that mattered was blocked wishes. Get it over with, Colts, he said to himself.

  A fourth-former, Wayne Hovell, came to the housemaster’s door, knocked, twisted his toes with caution, half wanting to be out on the water, wild in the dark and forgotten, the other half waiting for the harbour to go up stupidly thanks to Colts. Slope-shouldered, with a distinctively protuberant breastbone and a habit of tucking in his chin then jerking his head forward to make a point of incontrovertible rightness, Hovell was nicknamed Chook.

  He spoke his moral duty. ‘There’s something up, it’s stupid, it’ll go all wrong, it’s that, it’s that –’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Colts. He’s a bigger noise than Tojo.’

  The housemaster went to the side garden wearing a spotted dressing gown, holding an umbrella in the downpour. Old
Gargler slapped at mosquitoes against skinny calves that were pitted with shrapnel wounds from the First War job. Colts the moral blur. Hovell the wielder of conspicuous truths. The master knew which he liked better, but Hovell would be Head Boy soon enough.

  ‘Colts?’ he addressed the leading shadow coming home in sodden shirt and shorts, a boy with bony knees, wrists too large for shirt-cuffs, floppy hair of bedspring curls, eyes of bottle-brown making an appeal of tainted innocence.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Brains?’

  ‘Of a bird, sir.’

  ‘Of a brainless bird, Colts.’

  Old Gargler steered the boys into his study, whippy cane at the ready. They emptied their pockets of tobacco tins and pipes. Colts stepped forward untangling fingers from his hair and smearing clammy palms down the sides of his shorts, wondering who’d narked. Old Gargler was against boys nose-picking and combing their hair in class; for the rest he was mostly onside.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Sir.’

  Extending his arm, Colts rotated the cup of his right hand and stretched his palm obligingly. Victims of firing squads cultivating martyrdom displayed such pride, and Colts flinched but did not cry out.

  Gargler gave them his lecture and they listened with grave attention. ‘You could have been killed, aargh. How would the school have explained it? Aargh. You. Colts. What about Major Buckler? Imagine the shame, aargh.’

  Colts tried but it was too hard, really, and he could only grin. Wait until Buckler knew what they’d dared. Colts wouldn’t write any letters, he’d tell Dunc Buckler himself – follow the wheeltracks, cross the desert, climb the last sandhill, find the bush camp and be hailed for pluck and humour. That was the wish, although who knew how it would happen.

  Tired as he was, chastened as he was, and as flaming lucky, Colts slipped around warning fourth-formers to say their prayers. ‘You’re dead in the morning,’ he said, twisting ears and giving Chinese burns as a taste of things to come. ‘You’re maggot-meat, green mutton, duck-guts – you’re skinned.’ The one in particular, Chook Hovell, he kept his eye on, followed after lights-out, tackled on the flagstones of the deserted quad. Hovell fought back using fists like hammers while Colts knelt on his rib cage. Thumping and pounding, he couldn’t keep the kid down.

  ‘Say quits.’

  ‘Like buggery I will.’

  Colts stood back and gave a kick to Hovell’s weaving head that landed somewhere around the ear. After that jolt, Hovell drew raggedy breath but stared at Colts harder, cleaner, fiercer than before. A stare that said, I know better what a bloke should do.

  ‘It was me told Gargler,’ he said, getting up on all fours.

  ‘Berrk, berrk-berrk, bk-bk-bk.’

  ‘I’d do it again.’

  Leering down and calling Hovell a matchless prick, Colts chose to follow through to an ending, because once committed to an action there was no other path to follow. The coup de grâce was a tap to Hovell’s jaw with his toecap, hardly more than a gentle lofting motion, though it awfully sounded like a crunch. Regrettable, but there you were. No such thing as Marquis of Queensberry rules on a dark night, and guess whose quotation that was.

  On the trip they’d made in the last month of peace, Colts and Dunc Buckler came to the wide grassy curve of a thousand-acre river paddock. It was more beautiful in that arid landscape than a lord’s neglected parkland. With the truck unpacked and the camp site arranged, Colts came out from behind a tree flexing his bowling fingers and asking Buckler if he’d like a knock. Buckler found himself holding a bat. Seeing how useless he was made Colts laugh.

  ‘Give up.’

  He’d never joked like that with his guardian before. It was like getting his stripes.

  They unrolled their swags each side of the fire and lay propped on their elbows drinking burnt coffee mixed with sweetened condensed milk. It came from a tin cracked open with a tomahawk. In the morning they stamped their feet and warmed their hands at the embers. Emus came stalking towards them, attracted by Buckler standing near the truck and waving his grey felt hat. He was a square-built, dark-complexioned man, scowlingly handsome, full-lipped with a sensitive, almost offended twist to his smile. Colts often practised the look in a mirror: ‘Imshi Yallah,’ he hissed at Johnny Turks attacking him.

  Later in the day Buckler sat on the running board and balanced his Remington typewriter on a log. Bruising his fingertips, he generated the feeling of opposition he needed all the time. Authorship was good for that, he said.

  ‘What are you writin’?’ said Colts when he was back from potting rabbits with the .22 and Buckler was still at work, only pausing to brush away flies.

  ‘Never ask. It’s bad luck to tell.’

  When Buckler took a walk Colts looked anyway. Lifted a stone and rustled the loose pages with his long fingertips to find it was all about the would-be soldier, the sensations he would feel in battle. Buckler was the living ghost of old mates, the sworn defender who spoke for the dead. They’d spent their quota of flesh at Gallipoli and in France, and he lived the full nine lives making them right.

  ‘I’m calling it Infantry Fighter’s Handbook, if you want to know.’ Buckler shaded a hand across the page, stopping the boy from reading on. ‘The army chiefs don’t want it published; they don’t like the truth.’

  The few bits Colts read – ‘A normal reaction for a man and not a coward’s is to soil himself under fire’ – only confirmed Colts’s view that to be chosen by Buckler was the pinnacle. Shit-scared was how Colts felt often, but you could still be the best in Dunc Buckler’s books in that condition.

  It was Saturday cricket a few days after the night adventure. Colts took the new ball. Utilising a deceptive angling action, his fingers plucked at air, shimmered air currents where swallows flew – screwed blindness into a batsman’s stare. He was inspired by Randolph Knox, Captain of School and the First XI when Colts was a long-eyed thirteen and followed Knox everywhere in a worshipful gang. The ball nipped through a player’s defence and deftly removed the bails. With every delivery the umpire sucked his pencil but nodded play-on.

  Colts’s odd wrist action, almost a throw, produced its share of full tosses and wides, giving Colts three wickets for twenty runs that day. Old Gargler said if he could find the length it might be Colts for the NSW Colts. More was involved than competence with a ball, however. There was the matter of moral character to be measured. The school only did what it could with what it had. Old Gargler liked Colts but had no final answer when it came to character; sad to say, that was up to the Head, who arrived during tea, running a weary hand back through his silver hair. Word had reached him through an influential parent, Lady Margaret Hovell.

  ‘Colts?’ he called the boy over to the door of his car, declining to offer a seat, as he did to his favoured ones. ‘Do you know what you’re up for?’

  ‘Up for, sir?’

  ‘Don’t act the innocent, lad, it won’t wash.’

  Colts stood with his hands folded behind his back, hip cocked.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Stand straight when I’m talking to you,’ said the Head.

  Colts obliged like a piece of string not entirely devoid of slack.

  ‘Shoulders back,’ snapped the Head, and Colts, just then, braced inside his thoughts, having had enough of it, sensing what was coming. With a bothered sigh he returned to his habitual lean against nothing, getting his limbs arranged like half-balanced sticks, his grubby blue felt cricket cap pulled down over one eye.

  ‘Very well,’ the Head hissed. ‘So must it be.’

  Boys gathered in closer, savouring an event. The match hung waiting. Colts stepped into a school story published on coarse wartime newsprint, where chums raced around behind a jolly old principal and lashed his ankles together with school ties, and everyone had a good merry jape as the chief went facedown
in the turf, and later there would be forgiveness, raspberry buns, roast chestnuts, cocoa by the fire.

  Colts scratched himself on the backside.

  ‘Are you with me, lad?’

  Colts said he was, indeed.

  ‘Alackaday, Colts, I have written to your guardians, the Bucklers. You know the sort of letter I mean. I have penned only a handful of such missives in my long career.’

  ‘Why me, sir?’

  ‘We have a fourth-former in sick bay with a broken jaw, that is why.’

  The Head scrutinised Colts, the sort of wheedler he’d expected to find in a colony bred from slum children when he came out from Cambridge in ’33. Headstrong in games but lacking in moral valour.

  The matter of Colts’s orphan state, ward of Major Buckler and his birdlike bohemian wife, Veronica, moved the Head’s emotions only a little. Colts’s father, gassed in Belgium, had died in the early ’30s, and his mother passed away soon after. Call this a test for any boy, and sad, but with few families untouched by Great War tragedy – and the Head himself, though he never blew the regimental trumpet, taking a fair whipping on the Somme – there was no special pleading in it.

  The recalcitrant Dunc Buckler had been sent his account for term fees, plus several reminders, responding with airy excuses from various dismal posts.

  ‘I am ruling off the ledger, Colts. You are to return to the school, collect your belongings, and then a taxi will be called. I have telephoned Mrs Buckler, who is expecting you. After that, Colts, may the good Lord help you.’

  Veronica Buckler held her brush high, standing on a fruit crate to reach the top of the canvas; instead of bringing the bristles down to make a streaked, deliberate smear, so familiar to her as to be a reflex of the spirit, she jumped back to the floor and took a fistful of rags made from her husband’s old pyjamas and cleaned up.

  The Head’s phone call expelling Colts was a delicate condolence compared with more personally distressing news to hand. Her informant – ‘so sorry being the one to tell you’ – was a seedy young man Buckler had sacked, by the name of Des Molyneaux, assistant surveyor’s clerk. There’d been two letters three months apart, the first a wages demand, belittling Buckler in the tradition of slighted employees. Veronica was appealed to as keeper of the books. She’d sent ten pounds.