1915 (13 page)

Then it ended.

Ethel was on her feet screeching at two shapes lurking in the paperbarks, barely ten yards away. “You stinking Spicers, you bloody little spies!” She grabbed a stick and advanced on the now-standing boy and girl. The moment they blew raspberries and ran, Walter
remembered his buttons, fixed them, and was on his feet by the time Ethel turned around.

As they walked back to the picnic she said, “You can't say you've never been kissed.”

He was about to object, but said: “Thanks.”

“I'll still be here after the war,” she went on matter-of-factly, “Why not visit me then?”

“I will, definitely.” Looking at her side-on he discerned a different profile from before. Not sharp and hungry at all, but soft and sad. He ought to have been shocked by what had just happened, but wasn't. He had no curiosity about her — just a liking.

“Those things we did back there. I liked them.”

“Of course you did.”

Above the bank they could see the hats of the long jump judges. A balloon drifted past then burst on a thorn bush leaving scrappy green rags. They circumnavigated the sportsfield staying clear of the crowd.

“When a girl says ‘come and visit', does she always mean it?”

“Anyone's welcome who's nice.”

“Would you say it just out of politeness?”

“Not me!”

“Would someone else?”

“Someone?”

She gave him a look which showed she understood. Billy was certain to have mugged her up on Frances — though in probing, Walter hadn't meant her to realize. He said, “I didn't mean a special person,” intending to say “no-one in particular.” But it was too late.

“Oh, sure.
She
would have meant it.”

The sharp profile returned. A peculiar white knuckle showed on the tip of her nose. Could she possibly be jealous? But it didn't last.

“Here's why,” she said, good humouredly stiffening her right index finger on the palm of her left hand. “One: the Gilchrist money.”

“That's a myth.” But as the district could see, Alan Gilchrist sailed through the bad seasons — this year had been bad so far — and still sent his sons away to school.

“Two: you tickle a girl's interest.” She laughed, he blushed.

“Three: you're leaving.”

“Just that?”

“A girl hates to lose things.”

“But I wasn't leaving when the invitation was issued.”

“Was she?”

They had almost reached their families.

“Does a girl hate to lose even those things she hasn't got?”

“Some do. Especially what they haven't got.”

“What's number four?”

“There isn't one.”

“I saw — you were about to count off another.”

He bumped her shoulder accidently and she glanced at him unguardedly, taking the contact as a gesture of affection.

“I can't answer.”

“Come on. We're not playing riddles!”

But she galloped off, asking who won tilting-the-ring and the Old Buffers' race. When her name came up for a prize she ran backwards past Walter and called, “Honest, I can't say.”

The bump, a mere chance intimacy, in the meantime must have made her wonder. For when the picnic boiled itself out, and the sun sank low and cold, and a
string of sulkies and drays set off for the road junction with knots of walkers following, she very cosily took his arm.

“I know all about the girl in Sydney. Billy told me.”

“She's just someone I met. We've hardly ever spoken.” He wanted her to see how little there was to it. And there really wasn't. Who was Frances now? A hum thinning out along dark rails.

She sought his hand and held it among the folds of her tunic where no-one could see.

“I wish we'd — got to be friends — before,” Walter managed. He felt a kind of drunkenness with this angular girl beside him. Across the paddocks, under cut-out hills, a mist had developed. Above, the first star glared through a pinprick in the stretched blue. In a hollow they entered a band of cold air, then rose out of it into an atmosphere of dust and pollen stirred by the passing crowd. Ethel sneezed. Walter said: “Everyone's suddenly taken to me because I'm going. You'd hardly believe the change in my father — all year he's been rotten, but when the war business got going he did a double somersault.”

“I suppose he knows what he's missing.”

“No — he hates me.”

“When you and Billy came with the news I felt awful. Sometimes I get feelings about things. F'rinstance I knew Aunt Elsie Mackenzie was going to die.”

“So did we all.”

“I knew before anyone. I watched her once in church: she seemed to disappear. Uncle Hugh put his arm right through her when he reached for his hymn book.”

Ethel's practical sports-shoes trudged on beside Walter's boots.

“She might have just ducked outside for a tick.”

“You think I'm mad. Do you want to hear something else?”

“It depends.”

“After the war you and Billy will be safe. I had a dream where the two of you lived in houses with wives and babies.”

“Is that a promise? I think I'd rather die.”

“You mustn't joke. Your wife was awfully pretty.”

She released his hand, and leaned on his elbow for support while fishing for a pebble. The last picnickers had long since passed them and gathered fifty yards farther on, where the T-junction sent its arms north and south.

“Any more dreams?”

“The both of you were unhappy. Billy just stared at me. I
know
this war's going to change people.”

“It'll be a lark.”

But Ethel's dream unsettled him. The fate she pictured — that of the unhappy returnee — tossed him far ahead of anything he'd thought up for himself. War was a game involving picketed horses grazing under a bank while their riders in bush jackets and bandoliers crawled through rocks and grass on elbows and stomachs and popped their rifles at other distant figures, shabbily clad. The trouble with Ethel's scalp-creeping predictions was the way they planted him right here, at home, the very spurning of which was an act the war itself enabled.

“What about the final thing you wouldn't tell me. Was it good news or bad?”

“I'll have to think.”

“Was it about Frances Reilly?”

“
Who?
” She scuffed the gravel angrily. He'd broken
a rule by mentioning her name.

While he waited for an answer he discovered he understood a secret about the war. About his going.

It was this: every place, every person, had come to him bearing love. That was the reason why the country glowed specially yellow and green; why his mother had cried the other day when Douggie, home for the holidays, played drums on the pudding plates while their father watched cheerily; why flags draped every poor settlement hall; why Ethel had kissed him at the sports, why now she once more took his arm and steered him towards the junction. Love, love — only it didn't mean charity or comfort, nor even kindness. It was a torch of passion hurled from the darkness of a million small lives, which Walter was expected to catch and keep alight for others. Out of these thoughts he blurted:

“What if I didn't go?”

But Ethel passed no comment. She smiled a farewell and said, “You're right — it
was
about her. I'm sure she's —”

“Well?”

“I'm sure she's not like me — soft hearted. Oh, that doesn't mean bad luck for you. She'll take what she wants, and keep it. But do you think I'll ever amount to anything? The district's got me, and I'm stuck fast. Imagine, I've never been more than thirty miles from home. I can't see my life changing.”

“You'll marry.”

But Walter was dull when it came to predictions. And so dull in relation to Ethel that he couldn't picture her beyond the moment of their parting. Not one ounce of her.

“Marry? Even Duncan's done a bunk.”

She pecked him on the cheek in front of everyone. “Come back,” she whispered, and he knew that she meant to her, to their tangle by the creek, and not just “alive”. The spirit of this command cancelled the gloom of their parting exchanges, and for the first time Walter grasped her prediction of his survival as a formula for breezing through the months ahead.

“I'd be a mug not to,” he whispered in reply. With a sharp finger she poked him in the stomach.

The next day, an hour before the evening meal, Walter sat at the desk in the room called The Office. It was really a long bench, with invoices, letters, account books and catalogues stacked by his meticulous father in neat piles under the window. The chair was swivel-based, with fat leather padding on the seat. He took a clean sheet of paper, uncapped the inkwell, dipped the pen, let the blue liquid drain down, wiped the nib on the inkwell's glass lip, examined it, rattled the bone shaft of the pen on his teeth, and stared out the window.

What should he say?

His view extended down the home valley, a mere depression, to the blobs of trees on the low basking hills at the far side of the road. The last sunlight searching at ground level illuminated humped tree-roots and caused the grass to shine.

He stared, chewing the pen.

His mind leapt to impossible conclusions — there he was after the war with Frances, only she wasn't “awfully pretty”. When he saw a lump of child on her knee the scene went blank. All he wanted was a word with her. Then she squirmed in his arms under the wattle at the sports; ah — he travelled on the train again, this time without Mrs Stinson, and when the
lights went out he chased her for a kiss, but free of a tunnel she sat staring enigmatically out the window … But he too sat staring out a window, attached to this moment, these circumstances, this ignorance, lack of will, habit. One second ago the sun had been everywhere, lying in the grass gullies, unfocused at the edges but strong as gold at the centre. The next second it had gone, and the green undulations turned grey as cardboard. And in the room he was aware of hearing the last tick, but one, of the clock.

Again he dipped the nib and this time wrote the letter. He wrote slowly. He said he was glad at last to hear news of her from Billy. The war had caused a lot of excitement in Parkes. How were they taking it in the city? Quite a number had left already including Billy and others not known to her. He supposed many she knew must be going from Forbes. He was leaving soon himself. Time permitting, he would like to call on her in Sydney …

The light almost gone, Walter found himself leaning low over the paper as he wrote. When he reached the bottom of the page his face almost touched it. So in the near-darkness he bent a half-inch lower and deposited a kiss, feeling nothing at all like the way he'd felt with Ethel. His fresh-shaven face rustled across the dry surface. Then he signed his name, addressed and sealed an envelope, and sat awaiting the call to dinner.

“You'd better come with us,” offered Frank Barton after they left the train at Central.

They made their way up Pitt Street, soon entering a narrow-fronted hotel where Frank and Nugget Arthur were known, and where the woman in charge, fishing in a drawer for keys, did what Frank asked when he said: “Best give the young chap a room to his self.”

The two older soldiers left Walter at the first floor landing. A red-carpeted corridor ended at small windows in far distant walls. It was as if the narrow hotel had widened behind the facade, becoming greater than it seemed. Cane chairs and lounges relaxed in the gloom.

Then up Walter climbed to his room under the roof, placing two feet on each step as a child climbs.

Today was his twenty-first day in the army. Climbing the steps he counted them all, remembering each for its novelty, including the oath that had put an end to so much unfinished business, propelling him from one world to another: “… I will in all matters appertaining to my service discharge my duty according to the law. So help me God.”

His room was narrow, with a single iron bed against the wall and just enough space for the door to open. Part of the ceiling was occupied by the underside of the
continuing stair, a white-painted box that he could reach without stretching and creak with the palm of his hand. He liked the feeling of just this timbery stair leading to the sky, and his hand supporting it. A small casement window, chest high with stiff lace curtains, admitted chunks of last minute sunlight. He lay on the bed, boots on, and watched the magnified patterns of flowers move in and out of focus as the curtain shifted in a light breeze. Hairs of sunlit cotton threw shadows of microscopic life on the plastered wall. If he lay with his shoulder blades flat on the bed he could breathe deeply without feeling pain.

Was that why Frank and Nugget had invited him to tag along on this, their first weekend leave? Because of the fight with Pig Nolan?

Pig was a light horse recruit who had brought his nickname down from Gunnedah where his father owned a clothing store. He was Gunnedah's Eddie Harkness, the son of a town dignitary, only neater, with sandy brushed hair, a mouth of expensively maintained teeth and well-kept nails brought up to the touch of twill and banknotes. Also he was sharper than Eddie, smart and knowing, quick with figures. In a trice he became the regimental bookie, and that was how the trouble between them started.

Walter had put sixpence on Nugget Arthur the day of the horsebreaking. He stood a head taller than Pig and craned to see how the stake was recorded.

“Eyes off.”

“I was just looking.”

“Pay more, see more.”

They stood outside the mess hut. An orderly wiped his hands ready to clatter the iron triangle for breakfast. Men were draped everywhere in blue early morning shadows.

When Walter innocently looked even closer Pig said, “Shit, I'm going to have to smack your little fingers,” all the while inscribing neat figures with a slim blue pencil.

“It's my money.”

“It's mine till settlement.” Then Pig added exasperatedly: “This must be baby's first bet.”

“What'd you say?”

But Pig snapped the book shut and joined the others: Nugget Arthur squatting in grass at the base of a flagpole with knees bent up to his chin, his face after years of horsebreaking like a brown knobbly pear; Frank Barton with a shoulder propped on the same pole while his words uncoiled downwards; Bluey Clarke with elbows resting on the ledge of a tankstand (rump protruding) and with crossed feet swinging almost free of the ground; Boof Lucas also with an elbow on the tankstand, his face cupped in the palm of a hand so that his tallow-pale fleshy cheek bulged under his left eye. Frank Barton was the neatest person Walter had ever met. He searched continually for balls of fluff and flecks of cotton, finding snagged seeds on his trousers, and now, without distaste, diverting a wee white grub in mid-hoop from its journey towards a shirt pocket. With his head bent down it was difficult, always, to hear what he said.

He started to speak to Walter. Then the breakfast gong rang anyway, and they moved in. Bluey Clarke landed at a walk. Boof unstuck his hand but the bulge persisted, a farcical feature. Nugget Arthur limped for a couple of paces before his circulation got moving again. And on his toes Frank Barton climbed the steps of the mess hut with the smooth motion of a kangaroo dog. Somewhere among the others Pig Nolan had slithered inside unnoticed.

Mustered from the resting paddocks after breakfast the horses moved in tight, frantic circles, heads held high in panic and manes flying as gates were opened and mounts selected one by one for breaking; “Warrigals” from Narromine, but soon to be tamed and their sturdy Waler temperaments exploited. It was a long day. At noon Billy had turned up, flash in full dress uniform having ridden across from the other camp in a headquarters detachment. They talked in the privileged shade of a marquee, then following lunch Walter perched on the rails with a hundred others, a raucous spectator among many.

Afterwards he found Pig sitting cross-legged in the mouth of his tent counting money.

“I understand you owe me two bob.”

“‘Understand'? Either I owe it or I don't.”

“Sixpence at four to one. Nugget Arthur.”

Nolan made a pained show of consulting his book, dotting this, crossing that, licking a finger in feigned self-absorption.

“Well?”

A florin butterflied through the late afternoon light. “Now be a good boy and keep half for your mum and don't get drunk on the change.”

After locating the coin Walter hauled on a guy rope to straighten himself.

“Sorry?”

“Sorry?” returned Pig in the same tone.

“What are you getting at?”

“Always seeing things that aren't there.” Nolan clicked his tongue mock-parentally as he slithered the remaining coins into a small canvas bag and buttoned the notes into a shirt pocket. “I'm blessed if you're not.”

Walter found himself blocking the entrance.

“Out of my way,
boy
.” Pig used two fingers reversed in the up-you position insolently to stroke rather than push his way past. Walter replied by ramming the shorter man palm-flat on the sternum. Pig surprisingly fell backwards and landed unbalanced in a percussive heap.

“Struth —”

Perhaps a second or two passed while he pawed his way up from the boards, perhaps no time at all. For Pig flew, plummetting horizontally at stomach height to butt Walter in the solar plexus with his deft hard head.

A toppling Walter asked, “
Hook? Hook?
” wheezing the throat-high word a body makes when it requires air. He doubled over and nature co-operated by allowing a mouthful. But not Pig. Down came a rabbit punch.

Walter tried to point out, as if to a jury, “
Dirty fighter
.” It was an impotent appeal. A black curtain dropped and as suddenly climbed clear. Now he was lying on the ground and could see the toes of Nolan's boots a couple of feet away. But how unfair: one boot flew towards his chest and winded him once more with an oddly painless blow (here it was to hurt most later). The other lifted from the turf, dithered experimentally until it swung opposite his mouth, then hard leather deposited an exact and painful kiss on his upper lip.

Two feet took pity and left. Two feet unaccountably hostile picked their way across the patchy grass and disappeared. It seemed appropriate that a sharp-edged stone should materialize in the salty red stream which poured from Walter's mouth. But when he spat the object clear it turned into a tooth. Who was the kneeling stranger asking, “Mate?”

And this other who came running down the tent lines to stop with hands on hips: “Well, I'll be buggered. The quietest fight I've ever heard.”

Go away. I'm ashamed
.

A bugle call climbed into the air above the camp and curled there, hanging like a question mark.

His mind struggled to ask why. Why the fight? Groggily it seemed to have been over sixpence. Later he tried to explain things to Ollie Melrose who said, “Get back at him. But wait your chance and make it stick.”

Pig lacked charm, his power was charm's opposite, but the end result was the same. Everyone deferred to him. When Walter saw Pig surrounded by a bunch of cronies he felt like the lone enemy of evil. Some of those cronies were also Walter's new friends.

 

Even Frank and Nugget, these two wet heads of slicked down hair crossing the street to the Regal Café because the hotel did not serve an evening meal. Walter had dozed: now he hung from the window and watched the free show forty feet beneath, where the two known heads glistened, conferred, and bumped through swing doors. From high up the street revealed its hidden purposes. No movement appeared random, as it would from ground level. It was easy for Walter to envisage for himself a serene track of fate leading from upper Pitt Street to the Quay, and across the harbour to Cremorne.

He was too excited to feel hungry.

Too happy.

Five days ago a note had arrived from Frances
saying
Come next Saturday. We'll be keeping watch on all ferries
(the last phrase twice underlined, so that it flew from the surface of the blue notepaper). And she had finished
How Exciting!
in a burst of rocketry that glowed even now.

Certainly throwing Pig Nolan into a heap of shadows.

Walter had been given light duties in the officers' stables when who should poke his nose through the railings but Pig. It was the day of the letter, though: nothing could touch the idiotically smiling trooper with his bucket, shovel, broom, and inclination to whistle (except it hurt).

“Look who's drawn the easy life.”

Wait, warned an inner voice. Another side of him wanted to rush the gap, rattle the bucket, and childishly snarl. A third party was busy groping for a smart crack. A fourth fumed wordless.

By good luck Captain Ashworth's “Daisy” (hindquarters square-on to Pig) lifted her tail. The perfect oval that formed when muscles drew back filled with a half sphere of shit which enlarged, swelled like a green eye, rolled clear and slapped to the floor. It was followed by several more, a sequence of rapid dissolving drumbeats. Walter clownishly shrugged:

What can I add?

Pig slung an economical pellet of spit at the slithering mound, and departed.

He could wait. Happiness had that effect: everything, it seemed, could wait. Paying back Pig, food, sleep, even the journey to Cremorne could be infinitely delayed. Happiness took care of time with a golden promise:
now and forever
…

The room had turned almost completely dark. Walter stared at the ceiling and thought about home. Suddenly he was back on the place, swishing a stick through grass behind the house, eating dinner from a white plate rimmed with silver (a hated combination), listening to Douggie's chatter while thinking of something else. But this Walter-at-home experienced an elating effect of fulfilment: he was able to view himself in the future. It was like looking into the facing mirrors of a barber's shop and seeing not only the identical reflected images demanded by the laws of light but also varying images of himself as he must appear to others. The Walter who after his fight with Pig had angrily demanded a splash of water from a nearby firebucket and could not understand why his helpers refused (the bucket had been filled with sand) was, it had to be admitted, a bit of a prig. Introspective youth is always priggish —

Don't look. I'm ashamed. Ashamed of my blood, ashamed of my tooth lying in the grass (here come the ants). Ashamed of this humiliated body.

Why?

Because I love it. I love its name. I love my self and my self is broken (broken in the mirror). The prig in the mirror preceded by his physical template — about eighth down, sharp-outlined but one dimensional, not yet misty pale in the cube of glass. The army's purchase: Weight, ten stone eight. Height, five feet ten. Chest thirty-seven, expanded, forty-one. Age, twenty. Moles and identification marks, one under left nipple. Eyes, blue. Hair, brown. Religion, Presbyterian.

Pig had seen deeper than this.

And deeper too than —

Name?

Walter Edward Gilchrist.

Age?

Twenty.

Give date of birth.

Third of April, 1894.

Occupation?

I help my father.

Father's occupation? (tap of pencil)

Farmer.

That makes you
Farmer
.

(A pause)

Next of kin?

My mum or my dad?

Father.

Alan Gilchrist, “Whispering Pines”, Mt Cookapoi, via Parkes, New South Wales —

Pig had brushed aside the outline fitted by these labels, impatiently thrust past any explanation, and socked the prig they sheltered, socked him hard and fair.

Fair? Here was an odd number in the line of barber's shop selves deferring to Pig's judgment as readily as the next man, accepting not just the punishment he dealt, but his right to hand it out. What nonsense. I am the calm bloke of good fortune, the calm good bloke of fortune, the fortunate good of calm bloke …. Frank? Nugget? Ollie? They all appeared as witnesses, and when the barber in a judge's wig asked if such was the case they replied:

“Yeah, it's like he says.”

 

The many selves settled to one, the mirror faded,
and he woke: the room had sailed some way into the night; the ceiling was grey and low-hung like a cloud. Then out of the cloud came the sound of an unoiled hinge being slowly opened. No, the creak of wood. The roof. Someone was creeping up the stairway to the roof. A female giggle came wrapped in a deep-voiced murmur. Walter crossed to the window feeling ill from waking too early, from falling asleep in his clothes. From below came the
clap-clep-clup
of a slowing carthorse, and the grate of iron-rimmed wheels.

“
Don't
,” said the female voice over Walter's head. But the protest was followed by an unrestrained version of the stairbound giggle. Then again the male murmur, still muffled. Walter perched on the windowledge and leaned out till he saw the underside of curved rails, and just visible through the iron an army trouser lapped in folds of dark skirt.