Tourmaline Read Online Free PDF

said.
    ‘You’ll go to sleep.’
    ‘I’ve slept already,’ he told her. ‘I’m sober, Deb. Honest.’ He was very grave.
    I can see her standing there, tall and slender in her blue dress, and glimmering a little, golden, in the lamplight. She loved Kestrel, and probably feared him too; but she also loved Mary, and had made her a promise. So she stood hesitating.
    But Byrne already had one long thin blue denim leg over the window-sill, and had solved her problem to his own satisfaction. ‘I’m sober,’ he swore again. ‘Go home, Deb. You haven’t slept yet. Kes is waiting up for you.’ And as she still hesitated, he picked her up, rather timorously, and lifted her through the window. There she stood, in the moonlight, thrust out; and the two blue moons reflected in her deep eyes gave her a slightly wild and captive look.
    ‘Oh, all right,’ she said at last. ‘I suppose I have to. You won’t sleep, Byrnie?’
    ‘I won’t sleep,’ he promised. Then he turned away to look at the man on the bed, and forgot about her; so she paused no longer, but went out in the moonlight across the road, and through the lighted doorway of the hotel, where Kestrel seized her and enveloped her, like an octopus.
    Byrne hung over the man on the bed, whose face and neck and arms had been anointed by Mary with a mixture of baking soda and Vaseline, till he resembled a dancer painted for corroboree. He put his hand on the bedaubed forehead. It was cooler, not so dry as it had been in the afternoon, and the breathing was now less painful. He dampened the cloths around the man’s head, and neck, and sprinkled the sheet again, and sat down with the magazine to fan him and to watch. And he did watch, it seems, all night, he couldn’t take his eyes from the patient; who lay all this time exactly as we had placed him on the bed seven hours before, and stubbornly breathed on through his blubber-lips, oblivious.
    Towards sunrise, when Byrne had blown the lamp out, and the walls and the sheets and the white blotches on the man’s face were washed blue with the pre-dawn light, he began to stir and moan. Byrne leaned over him, and saw that he seemed to be trying to raise the swollen lids of his eyes (they too were plastered with Mary’s preparation), and was even showing a little of the iris, of indistinguishable colour. Byrne rested his hand on the sufferer’s hot chest, and placed his mouth close against him. ‘Who are you?’ he whispered.
    The man moved his head, restlessly, and groaned. Suddenly he whispered, in a weak childish voice, what sounded like: ‘Up to you.’
    ‘What’s your name?’ Byrne asked. ‘Your name, mate. Your name.’
    After that the man on the bed was silent for a long time, and Byrne drew back. But then he began again, moving his head on the pillow, and moaning, and the feeble voice began to break into words, groups of words separated by gasping silences. ‘Up to you,’ he said. And then: ‘To you, now…Don’t want…can’t take…not me to decide.’ And later, after a long pause: ‘Ah, piker! Oh God!’ When that was said, his eyes closed again.
    Byrne filled a glass from a jug of water on the table, lifted the man a little from the pillows and held it to his lips. For about a minute they sat there. Then the patient began to drink, sobbing and slobbering in his eagerness, and swallowed a second glassful after that, of our vile Tourmaline water, before Byrne laid him down. He lay still then, panting.
    ‘You’re no piker, son,’ Byrne said to him. ‘What’s your name?’
    But the man on the bed did not speak again, and seemed to have fallen into a profound sleep. So Byrne desisted. He sat back in his chair and watched the dawn outside revive the delicate colour of red earth and grey-green leaves and grey myall-stems. The lone rooster flapped and crowed. The black cat leaped on to the window-sill and sat there, staring. At six o’clock Mary came in in her nightgown and said: ‘Byrnie!’ He