The Soldier's Curse by Meg Keneally Read Free Book Online Page A

Monsarrat to its existence. He hoped to awaken it now, in hopes it might incline the man to help.
    â€˜Yes, well,’ said Spring. ‘Our graves, yours and mine, will be in a land which has never known our kind. I wonder whether it will revolt as it consumes us? It’s not used to consuming people, you know – the Birpai leave their dead in sacred trees in the hinterland.’
    â€˜Well, they may be in a state of mild revolution as we speak,’ said Monsarrat.
    â€˜Surely not! Hard to imagine a more peaceable people than the Birpai, when they have been given cause not to be, as well. What can be happening?’
    Monsarrat described the scene outside Government House. ‘Mrs Mulrooney is chiefly concerned with Mrs Shelborne’s rest,’ he said.
    â€˜As well she might be,’ said Spring. ‘I understand the dear lady is very ill.’
    â€˜Indeed she is, but there are other concerns. Parade will finish before noon. If Captain Diamond comes upon the scene at Government House, he may act rashly. He’s been playing at soldiers all morning, you see, and he might decide he’s finished with playing.’
    Monsarrat knew Spring had little liking for Diamond with his clipped vowels, moustache and manner. In the major’s absence, Diamond had been feeling his way through the command, and had ordered an audit of the stores, offending Spring with both extra work and the implication of thievery.
    â€˜We thought,’ he said, ‘if you could help us divine their intention, we might be able to convince them to disperse before any harm is done.’
    â€˜Of course,’ said Spring, laying aside his ledger and standing. ‘It sounds like a matter of utmost urgency.’

    Spring tried to share his fascination with the Birpai and their ways with those willing to listen. Monsarrat had cause to see Spring on a regular basis, as with the rest of the settlement he lined up weekly at the commissariat stores for his rations – bread, salt beef, and vegetables, which he was encouraged to supplement with whatever he was able to grow in the small garden attached to his hut.
    The patch of red dirt was, in his view, unworthy of the name garden, producing the occasional anaemic carrot or runtish bean, and despite his coaxing utterly failing to give him a pumpkin. He refused to believe this was down to his own gardening skills, adopting an attitude of which Mrs Mulrooney would have approved – it was the garden’s fault.
    So his visits to the store were necessary for his continued survival. On occasion he had seen Spring there in conversation with a particularly tall and strong Birpai man called Bangar, one of the bush constables, in unmarked canvas. Monsarrat was under the impression he was the brother of Spring’s lover, and the pair certainly seemed friendly whenever Monsarrat saw them together,conversing in the Birpai tongue, although Bangar was an intelligent man, and also spoke English.
    Bangar faded in and out of Monsarrat’s daily life. In his free time (of which he had more than another, more disciplinarian commandant would have allowed), Monsarrat frequently walked down to the river, along its southern bank, turning as it emptied into the ocean, until he reached the blackened tongue of rock which jutted out from Lady Nelson Beach, pointing into oblivion. He preferred to stand at an angle to it, facing south towards the hundreds of miles separating him from Sydney. Sometimes he would take a few symbolic steps, and tell himself he had begun his journey back.
    Occasionally on these walks he would find Bangar in step beside him, the man’s movements quick and quiet. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they walked in silence. But Bangar noticed everything. Recently, they had seen the corpse of a pademelon – which looked like a small kangaroo – rolling backwards and forwards at the edge of the ocean. An odd place for it, as pademelons preferred the