Break your chains, p.9
Break Your Chains, page 9
Molly may seem prickly, but she has a kind heart. ‘Not much chance of finding him in the Gazette, love – they only report the fancy bigwigs who disembark. The police office has the records of every convict to have set foot in Van Diemen’s Land, though – a clerk there could tell you.’
Your heart rises. ‘Can we go there now?’ you ask eagerly.
Molly snorts again. It seems her sympathy only goes so far. ‘You’d have to pay a clerk to read the list to you, and I doubt you have two brass pennies to rub together,’ she says. ‘Anyway, we’re not to waste the master’s time with personal errands for missing fathers – I need you at the markets now. Come along.’
As you trail Molly through the markets, a basket of apples over your arm, you can’t get the idea of your da out of your head. Molly’s right, you don’t have two brass pennies to rub together, but you have something much better than that: your golden bracelet, which has been with you through so much, and is even now jiggling lightly inside your petticoat hem.
You could make it seem as if you’ve just lost Molly in the crowd – slow as she is with her stick, you could get away from her easily – and then run and get the list read. Imagine knowing that your da were here in Van Diemen’s Land!
Then you hear a sensible voice in your head: Imagine giving up your precious bracelet, only to find Da’s not even here. He could be dead, or in one of the other colonies, or back on a hulk. Then you’d have lost your treasure for nothing. Not to mention that they don’t take kindly to runaway convicts here. You could be put back in gaol, or even hanged!
You smile ruefully – that’s Sarah’s voice you’re hearing.
Still, you’ve survived this far. The sea breeze whips your skirts and hair. Maybe it’s time to throw caution to the wind.
To run away from Molly and find out if Da’s on the police office list, go to scene 22.
To stay with Molly and try to find Da later, go to scene 23.
Molly is shuffling further away with her stick, her back turned to you. You’re not due to meet the master for another two hours. You might never have a better chance to get away and search for Da.
I have to do it, you think. I’m going to do it.
The wharves are bustling, but the crowd is not so dense that you can simply disappear into it. You need a place to hide.
There is an ox-and-cart left unattended only a stone’s throw away, with a canvas cover over the cart. Quick as a cat, you dive into the empty cart beneath the canvas, peeking out through a little gap. Just in time! Molly turns around, and realises you are missing.
You had planned to come back to her after you’d had the shipping master’s list read, full of apologies and excuses, hoping she would believe that you’d become accidentally separated from her.
Now you hear her words from the other day ringing in your mind: You’re fair keen, aren’t you, girl? Planning to slip off and escape, are you?
Molly is suspicious – much more suspicious than you want her to be: she gives an exasperated groan, rolls her eyes, and begins pacing back towards you, her eyes now narrowed, muttering, ‘Knew it was a bad idea … me so slow, and her so fast … “I’ll help you,” she says. Not likely! Can’t trust those Irish girls.’
You stay flat and low beneath the canvas. There is a musty potato smell, and the cart beneath you is splintery. You chance a glance out every so often, and Molly is always still within sight, pacing and cursing.
Then you feel a jolt and a lurch: your cart is moving! Great – it is carrying you out of sight of Molly!
But it is also taking you in the wrong direction, away from the police office, towards God knows where. You’ll have to jump out. Already you’ve reached the end of the wharf area, and now the cart is picking up some speed. Molly is about four hundred yards away. You’ll have to jump now!
You roll back the cover and spring to the ground.
Crack! You land on an uneven cobblestone, and your leg buckles under you. You fall heavily sideways and your head hits the stony ground. You cry out, feeling blood trickle down your face. The pain in your foot is breathtaking. You look down, and it looks like a clay foot on a broken doll that has been stuck back on at the wrong angle. Vomit rises in your throat. You try desperately to crawl to the side of the road for some cover before Molly sees you.
Too late! You hear her shout, and see her wave her stick, and a horrible, slow-motion cat-and-mouse chase is on: Molly hobbling along with her stick and twisted ankle; you on all fours, with your badly broken foot and blood dripping into your eyes. Rage chasing desperation.
A nearby shopkeeper realises what’s going on and collars you firmly. As he waits for Molly to catch up, he shakes his head.
‘Tsk tsk. They give you too many chances, you convicts. Your parents’ generation would’ve hanged for half the things you all do – but, no, the judge gives you the chance of a new start. And do you take it? Do you work for your ticket of leave, and make an honest future for yourselves? No! You cheat and swindle and escape and murder. Bloody fools, the lot of you. It’s in your blood, no doubt. You should all be hanged.’
YOU ARE NOT hanged, but you are sentenced to a gaol term in the same dim, freezing cells you were held in when you first arrived.
They search you so thoroughly when you arrive that the bracelet in the hem of your petticoat is found. The wardens won’t believe it isn’t stolen, and it is taken from you. ‘Thief’ is added to your list of crimes.
Your hair is hacked off, leaving only prickly clumps behind. You are put to work, washing and wringing sheets.
You weakly force yourself through each day, collapsing into a short, dreamless sleep each night. Although a doctor comes to treat your ankle, it never heals. It looks bruised and odd, and after months, your walk forms into a twisted hobble.
The other women call you Hop-Along, but you can’t laugh. You can’t make yourself care about anything anymore – all feeling has been burnt out of you, leaving ashes. There are no mirrors here, but sometimes you see your dead-eyed, crooked form looking back at you from a puddle, and you don’t recognise it.
When a bout of pneumonia strikes the prison in wintertime, you have no strength to fight it. Day after day, as you force yourself to work, you feel the coughing and the fever dragging you deeper, chewing you, until you think: Just let it end… I’ve had enough…
You begin to hear voices, and in your feverish haze, you’re not sure if it’s the women in your cell speaking, or the voices of the dead.
‘If you had your life over again, what would you do differently?’
‘Ah, there’s no point in regrets! What’s done is done – you can’t change the past.’
‘It doesn’t do good to dwell on it, I suppose. But I can’t help thinking, if the timing had been different… if the choices had been different… would I be with him now? Or would I always end up here?’
You don’t have the clarity of mind to work anything out. Fever burns through your brain. You think of how drained your ma looked before she died, and you know you’re ready to go and join her. You hope that wherever she is will be a better place than here.
Your cough rattles the last of the strength from your body. You’ve fought for so long that it will be a relief to stop. You welcome death’s quietness, its release. The fever can move on through the gaol, like the hungry fire that it is, looking for more fuel. The voices fade as your breath slows, then ceases.
To return to your last choice and try again, go to scene 21.
Once again, I’ve made the sensible choice, you think a few hours later, rolling your eyes to yourself as you climb up onto the ox-and-cart behind Molly and the master for the long, bum-numbing trip home to Bothwell.
You’re glad not to have parted ways with your bracelet, though. You like to think that it wants to stay with you – as if it has a mind or spirit of its own. You suppose it’s become something of a good-luck charm to you – if you can call a dead mother, a gaol term, and exile to the furthest-flung place in the world ‘good luck’.
You’ve had some strange dreams about the bracelet since you arrived at Bothwell. You’ve dreamt you’re walking away from the house, wearing only your nightie, following the sound of singing: a woman’s voice, in a strange tongue – a keening, bubbly string of words.
In the dream, you are holding your bracelet in your hand, but the colours of the stones are rubbing off on your palm, marking your skin with rainbow streaks. You want to find this singing woman, and show it to her. You think she’ll be able to explain it somehow. But you wander, and wander, and wander, never getting any closer to the source of the singing. Then you wake up.
THE MORNING AFTER your arrival home from your trip to town, you are in the kitchen, peeling potatoes, your head crammed full of thoughts. A fresh breeze wafts into the room, tempting you outside. You haven’t been able to stop thinking about Da.
There’s only a slim chance that Da has been transported to Van Diemen’s Land, and yet having the list read at the police office is the only chance you have of finding out for sure.
You are trying to think up a plan of how you’ll achieve that on your next trip to town … and feeling frustrated with yourself that you didn’t take your chance yesterday … and wishing you were outside … and thinking of that strange dream you had again last night … and in the end, your head gets so full that it forgets where your fingers are, and you slip and slice yourself with the peeling knife.
‘Damn this!’ you say, and you plonk down the slightly bloodied potato and storm outside to take a breath. Molly and Joe are nowhere in sight, and the master is away at another meeting in Bothwell town.
Bruno, the dog, darts past your legs. He is wagging his tail as if he’s running to greet an old friend, but he just ducks under the gate and runs off to an empty stand of trees. At least, you thought they were empty, until you see a dark hand emerge to scratch behind Bruno’s ears, and a head of curly black hair duck down to greet him.
You don’t know whose grin is wider – Bruno’s or the boy’s.
There is a native boy just outside the back gate, and yet you can’t bring yourself to feel frightened of him – not when you see him with Bruno, so playful and relaxed. Still, you slip back inside the door, and watch through a crack.
The boy, wearing an animal-skin skirt and no shirt, strolls into your garden as if he owns the place. Which, it occurs to you, he probably did, before the master came along – just as you Irish owned your country before the British took that too.
Bruno trots alongside the boy adoringly. With just one finger, the boy lifts the latch on your chicken coop. It swings open, and he ducks inside. You are incredulous: that door always gets stuck and creaks. He did this so easily that it’s clear he’s been here before. Then out he pops, curly hair bobbing under the doorframe, a black-and-white chicken under one arm. He gives Bruno another pat, and then, swish, silently closes the creaky coop door and—
Hang on, you think. Am I just going to let this boy waltz out of here with one of my chickens?
All right, they’re the master’s chickens. But there’s precious little food around here, apart from what you grow yourselves. You need that chicken!
You burst out of the door, and the boy turns, astonished. There is no spear in his hand, but you do see a little knife swinging from a string around his waist. The chicken clucks under his arm, pressed against his bare torso. The boy seems younger than you – maybe ten or eleven.
For a long moment, you size each other up. There’s no sound but Bruno’s gentle panting. Your eyes are locked.
Then, suddenly, there are footsteps and a voice from the kitchen – Molly is back. The boy turns and runs out the back gate in a flash.
You hesitate. Should you give chase, get back your chicken, and win praise from Molly and the master? You don’t enjoy being stolen from.
Mind you, since becoming a convict, you have plenty of sympathy for people caught stealing. Is one less chicken so terrible? You could let the boy go, and speak to Joe later about putting a lock on the coop – although somehow you doubt that would stop this clever, agile-fingered boy.
If you give chase to the boy and your chicken, go to scene 24.
If you let the boy escape and go back inside, go to scene 25.
To read a fact file on Tasmanian Aboriginal people click here, then return to this page to make your choice.
‘Hey,’ you shout, ‘that’s my chicken!’
You sprint through the trees, following the glimpse of the curly-haired boy’s back. Your legs carry you like the wind, over spiky grass tufts, up a hill of those strange pale-limbed trees with the dark, waxy leaves. You can hear insects chirping, your breath coming in gasps, your blood pounding.
You’ve just lost sight of the boy when you hear a chicken squawk. You hurl yourself towards the sound, determined he won’t get away.
You smell the smoke too late, and almost run into the fire. You pull yourself up short, arms windmilling.
There is a woman sitting beside the fire. She is completely naked except for a grey fur necklace, and she is wringing the chicken’s neck.
The woman sees you and stands up warily, tossing the chicken onto the coals. The air fills with the horrid stench of burning feathers. You back away, your breath coming in short gasps.
The young, curly-haired boy steps out from the bush, places a hand on the woman’s arm as if to protect her, and draws his knife. He calls one word in his language and, silent as smoke, three men appear through the trees. They all have skin as black as the night. One wears his hair in muddy ropes. Another has a spear, which he is raising, pointing straight at you.
You run – run like you’ve never run before, certain that at any moment now, you will hear a swish as the spear flies through the air, and feel the agony as it pierces your back. Your feet seem to hardly touch the ground. You hear people pursuing you, their footsteps pounding the ground not far behind.
Is this how I die? you think. Is this finally it?
Not today. Not if you can help it. Your breath gushes in and out, in and out, in time with your legs, forming a fast, steady rhythm.
I have to live – find Da, I have to live – find Da, I have to live, your mind chants, in time with your breath.
You look over your shoulder, your arms and legs still pumping forward, and see that you’re still being followed. And then it happens. The ground is suddenly not there. You see the edge of the cliff as you are running over it.
Your arms flail in empty air. The moment of flight stretches out, so that it seems to happen very slowly, as if you are dreaming. How strange to be dropping, somersaulting down, your body plummeting, all sight and sound a blur.
You hit the bottom of the quarry with a crack like a gun going off. The breath is snapped from your chest and you are gulping like a fish, trying to force the air back in, but your chest has closed tight and you can’t breathe.
Finally, though, the air starts to enter your chest again, a little at a time, and it comes out in screams of pain. Your thigh bone has snapped, and the pain is excruciating. The pain is so big that it swallows up the rest of the world, swallows up all thought, and squeezes you in its fist. You pass out.
WHEN YOU NEXT open your eyes, you are still in the sandstone quarry, but now you are surrounded by the people who were pursuing you. The man who had the spear is lifting a big rock above your head. He says something in a firm tone. His eyes are grim.
You brace yourself for the rock to land on your head – the final blow that will end your suffering and your life. But the man with the muddy hair reaches out and stops him. They argue.
You manage to look down. Your skirt and petticoat has been ripped away, to reveal an open wound: a fragment of broken bone sticks out of your thigh, blood pulsing out around it. The blood feels warm and sticky. A wave of pain lifts you like a boat. You close your eyes.
YOU OPEN YOUR eyes. You smell roasting chicken, and your stomach rumbles. Maybe there will be some left from the master’s dinner and you’ll share it with Molly.
But all you can see are pink clouds, and then a concerned strange face. You realise there are hands on you: hands pressing your thigh; hands holding you down. You writhe in pain. Hands grip your ankle, and there is a flurry of talking, a very strong pull, and then … relief. Your thigh still hurts, but the agony is gone.
You lift your head a little to see your helpers tying your ankle firmly to a branch splinted down the side of your leg. Your skirt and petticoat have been mostly ripped away. What’s left is red with blood.
The blood is still rising and draining from your thigh, unstoppable as a spring. Someone takes a blood-soaked pad of bark from the wound and presses down a new one, to try to stem the flow. You feel overwhelmed by dizziness. You close your eyes.
YOU ARE HAVING that same dream you’ve had since you arrived here: the woman’s voice singing, in lilting, knotted strands of voice, worn with time. You go to follow the song, then realise it’s right around you. You have found the song. In your dream, you look down at the bracelet in your palm, and it’s whole again.
YOU OPEN YOUR eyes. There are stars above you. You can hear a quiet breeze in the leaves. Someone is pushing warm chicken meat between your lips. As you chew, they also let a little water dribble from their cupped hands into your parched throat.
You try to reach down to your petticoat hem, although your petticoat is not there anymore, of course. You want to hold your bracelet, as you did in the dream. It’s agony to try to move.
A warm, grandmotherly face appears above you. She pats your arms and holds your hand.
‘I have a gift for you,’ you whisper. ‘A bracelet in my petticoat – I want you to have it. Please.’
She strokes your hair gently back from your face and begins to sing the song from your dream. There are tears in her eyes.
Everything blurs, as though the scene were an ink picture with water tipped over it. You feel a creeping coldness, despite the fire, the meat and the song.
