1915 (18 page)

“I'll go if they give me an aeroplane, but on the ground I've had all the excitement I can take. Did I tell you? I was shot at in mistake for an infamous half-breed.” He re-created the incident: there he was with the crumbling brick of a ladies' dress shop spitting fragments at him while he sheltered in the lee of a rapidly percolating limousine. Rosa, it appeared, was not unused to gun-play, and calmly took a dress into
the changing room and locked the door, emerging in a smashing gown after the show was over. They shot the man. He turned his head when the
policia
whistled low, and Robert whistled softly, to show the deadly ease with which a life may be despatched.

“Do you think, perhaps, that Ro —
her
— she didn't care one way or the other?” asked Sharon.

“Heavens no. She's just plucky.”

“What colour was the dress?” asked Frances, who envied Rosa's pluck. Robert gave a picture of something they could tell was the smartest thing that side of London, or this. It was quite deflating. When was he “bringing her over”? Would it be a Sydney wedding? Could they come? Wouldn't he be lonely?

 

Then the meal was over, and time passed with a green golden swiftness thanks to the heady wine through which they all swam, loud-voiced, leaving their appointed seats and moving in contrary circles around the table, here a palm flattened between an abandoned serving of Charlotte Rousse and one of apple pie while someone leaned and talked, their cigarette ash in a coffee cup, here Helen levering elbows aside as she attempted to clear things, there — everywhere — the chance to linger one's gaze on the dark damp eye, the unique eyebrows, and the promised lips of a loved one in the verdant light of mid-afternoon.

“Why did you look at Harry so funnily, before?”

“He winked at me.”

Walter found himself pumping Mrs Reilly's hand: “Wonderful! Wonderful!”

“I'm glad,” but she plucked the half-full glass from his hand and placed it on Helen's passing tray, and said sternly to Frances, “He's had quite enough.” But why should he resent it? Though she would not dare interfere with Robert Gillen like that, or even Billy, suddenly he loved her too and she could have done anything.

“What about our walk? Now?”

“Yes. I do promise. But not now. Mum?” She disappeared to help.

At his elbow Sharon leaned close to Robert. Complaining about delays with the wool cheque he said, “It's damned frustrating, I must talk to Harry about it,” and Harry instantly hove up. Then Sharon in the full hearing of anyone who cared to listen made a raw confession: “I'm frustrated too.”

Frances re-entered the room and started to make her way towards Walter. But this tete-a-tete stood between. She opened her mouth to say “excuse me” but the pair was engrossed. Robert had drunk too much and was now red-faced and puffy around his inappropriately boyish eyes with their reluctant creases. “I'm staying at the Australia all this week.”

“Really? But I'm meeting a friend there on Monday evening.”

“Look me up. Ask for me any time after four.”

“All right. I shall.”

“This person you're meeting —”

“Do
you
have a friend?”

“Indeed I do.”

“Then — shall we? — I mean, can we say five, definitely?”

Walter and Frances found themselves looking into each other's eyes — as if in a game of dares they held
on: eye dissolving into eye, their eavesdropping providing a chorus both urgent and plain as it demanded, if they were to touch, an end to sentiment for him and for her an end to hesitation.

“About the walk?”

“Can you stay? Mum says stay to tea if you like. Yes? Then let's go later, when it's cool.” She took his arm and guided him to the window, then turned to look at him because the light fell full on his face, whereas to Walter hers was darkened by the brilliance of the outside world.

 

Before the light failed Billy took more than two dozen photographs, but no grouping, he found, ever arranged itself to show just what it was about the day that he wished to hold, stare at, then tear to pieces. When the film was developed and printed — perhaps he would find it then. He needed time to think, having concluded as the afternoon lengthened that it was not just Walter who irritated him like a rash, but nearly everyone there except Diana.

Not that he gave anything away. Instead he had laughed, waving them together and apart like a professional, then scuttling forward to arrange a fold of dress and pinch a leg (Diana's), and they had laughed, and the kookaburras cackled as the low sun saluted tawny branches, and Walter put his arm around his shoulders at one stage, and he in return put an arm around Walter's and they had sung sentimental songs down by the water, bare footed, bare stockinged, until the stars came out and Mrs Reilly coo-eed from the heights to call them up for sandwiches and ginger beer.
Then he had shaken Robert Gillen's hand, thanked the hostess and her daughter, giving an extra squeeze to Diana's proffered hand because he knew she liked him, and finally he had set off, buttoning his jacket, for the ferry.

Diana and the maid were the only people at the lunch he had felt any liking for at all. Earlier on, when he had blundered into the kitchen for a glass of water and heard Helen saying matter-of-factly to Mrs Reilly while her hands glistened with soapsuds, “They're not my type. The war is going to be such fun for them. Nor's Mr Gillen my type — Lord, no — he'll sit at home like many but bet your boots
he
won't be grieving. Oh! Can I help you, Mr Mackenzie?” he had liked her. She had resembled his mother standing there, bravely complaining, though she was young. She was embarrassed and bold. And for a second Billy did not feel alone in the world.

Also a truth struck him while talking with Walter and Robert Gillen after the party had spilled onto the lawn, finishing a last bottle of champagne and making their minds up about the expedition down to the rocks. What had they been talking about? Gillen expressed the hope that the “dingo” he had left in charge of his polo ponies had been keeping them up to the mark during his absence. Now it happened that Billy fancied himself at polo. He had played in scratch matches around the district, where the game had no meaning other than itself (the local butcher was captain), and since joining up had trained with the major who was an enthusiast and liked Billy's determination and Novelty's experience. So when Gillen said to Walter, “Come up home some time and take a look at them. You might even like a game, eh?” Billy waited for an
invitation too, but did not get one, nor did Walter drop a hint.

So the jolly smiles that had been flashed at Billy, the questions and the playing up to him, the easygoing tales of South America that Gillen had seemed to tell for Billy's sake as much as anyone else's, just went for nothing.

Then something happened when he almost reached the wharf that made him change his mind. Frances came running along the path and invited him back. Walter was staying — please, for Diana's sake — would he stay too?

So he did, but lived to regret the decision, and for different reasons so did Walter.

Even when burning strands of tobacco soared to the ground, when the dead match joined them and the chamber once again went black, the officer's curious face insisted on yielding up its details: silvered lips, an old parrot's hook of dusty nose, forehead squarely frowning, and yet — he'd laughed. All the way up the hill, guiding the newly-arrived light horsemen to a high trench in the terrifying darkness, the few times he'd spoken, there'd been a quack of laughter: “You'll come under fire, so don't wet your jodhpurs — drift left — talk and you'll lose your teeth.” The mouth that issued the warnings itself spluttered toothlessly, counting each man with a thump on his pack: “This way. Follow the string. The heathen can't reach us now …”

At last someone found a candle. Its flame curved through the air behind the smoking man and puttered into a nook of hollowed-out earth, where it grew enormous. “Small chaps are as good as giants,” he drawled reassuringly to Carl Peters, whose nickname was Lizzie. Then he stood upright, the only man in the chamber able to do so without banging his head. “It's not the constitution,” he observed, “but Mr Colt makes all men equal.” The closest face was still Lizzie's, a nodding freckled thistle. “I've seen big men crumble,” the officer's laughter became a nose-cleaning operation,
“I'm not one myself.”

They waited for him to spit, but heard a creaking liquid swallow. The place where they sat was a rough and dusty chamber joined to the forward trench line by a narrow tunnel-like communication trench. Similar chambers, roofed with logs and tin sheets, stretched away on either side.

“You, you and you,” the officer pointed, “doss here with my chaps. The rest take the next bend round.” It took only seconds for his exhausted infantrymen to drape themselves on sacking and expire like overworked sheepdogs, while Lizzie and the rest of the new arrivals slipped around the corner leaving the three men picked by the officer too excited to sleep. Two found adjoining ledges, while the other, dark-bodied and cream-haired, perched himself between strangers. Morosely he raised a buttock and farted. “Boof —” hissed Frank Barton, who was smoothing a handkerchief on his pack for a pillowcase. His younger neighbour, head between his knees, tore at slimed knots in bootlaces.

Boof shuffled between them. “Who did the half-pint think he was — him and his bloody niggers.”

The exhausted sooty-faced soldiers slept on.

Boof squatted: “Wal?”

“How about finding the ventilation.”

“I called him ‘Shorty' in the dark. That's what done it.”

Walter ploughed a hand through greasy coils of hair. “He was trying to make Lizzie feel better. Couldn't you tell?”

Boof was the same age — twenty or so — but Walter was a puzzle. Tall, pale-faced with prominent eyebrows, he characteristically sat with elbows
balanced on bony knees, hands clasped tight, giving out the unfocused look he offered Boof now.

“Bullshit,” Boof insisted.

From his ledge Frank purred: “Wally's right. The major picked Lizzie for a nerve case. But I've seen Lizzie bounce back — he's a tiger … Cool off, Boof. You're all worked up over nothing … have a smoke … Lizzie ought to be grateful … it's stuffy like a mine in here, ain't it?”

A peaceful influence, Frank talked on. Boof succumbed, rocked on his haunches, hummed a soft and tuneful
Lonesome Pine
. It was then that Walter making a last attempt to loosen his bootlaces discovered his wound, an inch-long scratch along a crease on the palm of his right hand: hardly more obvious than a snip of pink thread. An inoculation against the worst. It had happened that night during their climb through the dark, when a spray of gravel had been flung up by a sniper's random bullet. The projectile hissed, stones slithered. Walter had fanned a hand across his eyes deflecting a trickle of spiked earth while Lizzie caught a fragment in the web of flesh between thumb and forefinger: “A snake,” he had squeaked. Only then had the special
tock
of low-aimed rifle fire separated itself from the rest to indicate a sniper. “Suck it,” the major had wheezed, then urged the file upwards.

Now Boof said cheerily, “They'd better watch out.”

With everyone settled, the sound of the guns leaked through hidden crevices: half a hundred dust pans and brushes knocking and clattering.

“What happened to Bluey?”

Frank smoothed his moustache: “I never saw. He waited. No, he was with us at dark.”

“Hear that one —” Shrapnel scattered overhead like
a handful of gravel, troublemaker's gravel in a side street of town.

“I could do with a laugh.”

“It's closing in.”

 

On their arrival from the bivouac down near the beach, where they had spent two nervous days under the stars after sailing from Egypt, the dugout had seemed wonderfully safe, with its entrance sandbagged like an impregnable stack of wheat, the depths supported by props of newly barked wood — a deep burrow, unlike the surface funk-holes of the past few days.

The chill spring air crept in, Frank snored.

Someone — a giant — moved heavy sideboards from side to side in a bare room overhead. A dead weight dropped and struck a spine deep in the earth. Walter's booted heels rattled on the tin support at the end of his ledge: his head trembled, bounced. “Frank — what the hell!” Light from a slush lamp cast sweeping shadows that collided and drew apart like huge eyelids in a metal sky. How long had he slept under their scrutiny — “Frank?” There'd been another heavy explosion. Propped on an elbow, Walter saw Frank cross himself, then unsnap the leather lid of his watch.

“It's just gone one.”

On the far side of the chamber their lieutenant appeared trailing a rifle, peering at the face of one draped form after another.

“
Sss
, over here.”

Later, one of the infantrymen vomited into a tin.
Another, lying awake smoking, waved to Walter through the gloom as if from a silent drifting dinghy on a subterranean lake.

Was it a dream — the major returning, exchanging words with those of his men awake, pausing a moment right here to say, “I'm Major Mason. Where are you from, sonny?”

Two stretcher bearers moved through the chamber carrying a limp body. Opposite Walter's ledge one of them bumped his head and the man they were carrying rolled to the floor, a log of stained bandages.

“Fix him good,” said the first bearer, while the second knelt, spun loops of rope, and viciously tugged them tight.

“I knew him,” croaked Walter, with horror recognizing a face he had not seen for years. It was Andy Pettigrew, the head prefect of 1910. As the bearers moved off, Pettigrew seemed lost in contemplation of sour duty. Then the lower half of his right leg flopped loose, swinging from the knee — resulting in a change of mood: the dangling leg belonged to a carefree spectator at the boat races. Frank spoke a name in his sleep: “Mossie,” and Andy Pettigrew's straw boater sailed into the harbour. All Walter could think was: “I've outlived him.”

 

“Tea?”

It was dawn. Their first day in the forward line of trenches was beginning. At Walter's elbow, a fist proffering a quart pot. Frank already up, rifle on knees, the bolt sliding back and forth as he listened for the scrape of grit. Frank dipping his ear, the metal rapidly
slicking. Frank fastidiously wiping an invisible mote with the ball of his thumb.

The tea-pouring soldier took a mug for himself and joined them. He was unshaven, with a drunkard's yellow eyes and moist laugh. But he spoke his name firmly. No, not a drunkard — a man who had never slept. “Get ready to hold your breath,” said this George Mullens, “when the morning breeze springs up you'll need to.” He aimed a finger at the bulkhead of earth that separated the support trench from the firing line: “They'll come wafting through with the early sun.” He meant the thousands of decomposing Turks who had died in the attack of several nights before — the night Walter and Frank and Boof and the rest of the Second Brigade of Light Horse had grated ashore on the Peninsula and ignorantly stared about. They had arrived on the beach incredulous, unable to imagine that the chaos on the heights overhead was caused by one group of humans in battle with another. Lizzie had said: “They're just skiting. The old hands are showing off to put the wind up us.” Because of a peculiarity in the atmosphere they had been able to follow the course of artillery shells across the sky: red hot delights. Then the regiment had been urged along single-file paths to a mysterious knoll, where they scraped holes and were told to wait for an enemy who at that instant was attacking the upper positions in his thousands. But he never streamed down the gullies as expected, because of this — the slaughter described by George Mullens.

“It was pathetic,” he said, “like a rabbit drive.”

A while later, when Frank in embarrassment started cleaning his rifle all over again — Mullens's eyes balanced on a glass brink of tears — the exhausted soldier said: “They asked for it, but we've all got blood
on our hands now.” A dirty mitt swiped at his neck bristles, then hovered in front of his face as if beseeching his own silence. “Their officers drove them towards us while we sent 'em back — to hell. Do their lot have a hell? Some of the rifles overheated and seized up.” He told about a well known cricketer who'd perched on the parapet taking pot-shots until he toppled backwards.

As Mullens talked in his crazed voice men cracked biscuits, sipped tea, licked apricot jam from fingers. “Some offered money for a chance. There were queues — and fights when one wouldn't give over to let the next take his place. They ran up and down with blood in their boots.” The fatherly Frank reached out: “Spare us the details, eh?” But Mullens brushed his hand clear and continued, a thick-lipped boxer lurching through his last round. “The lance-corporal came back with an ammo box under each arm singing ‘Rose of Tralee'. The wounded helped, ripping lids off. Meantime the Turks crept up again, and we fired with those great — flopping —
men
— falling dead on the sandbags.”

A diffident interruption from Major Mason — “Mullens, the tale's got whiskers” — only stirred the man further. He stood, banging his head on a rafter, the factual
donk
failing to bring him to his senses, and shouted, “Hurrah! The hounds are on the run!”

Ah, but then he squatted, smiled, shrugged, and the spectators exchanged bashful looks. Not everyone was made in the stamp of —

“
Mullens!
” barked the major as the sly madman scooped up his rifle and set off, sidestepping men seated, men half kneeling, men with biscuits partway jammed in bulging mouths: a frieze of astonishment.

“That's just Mullens,” the major paused, breathing
hard, “you mustn't mind him.” He straightened his hat and streaked off in pursuit.

“Baa! Baa!” bleated Lizzie Peters, employing a much favoured expression.

Mullens had headed straight for the front line.

Boof Lucas turned white, but taking a cue from Lizzie rotated a finger round a scone-fat ear. Then they heard a familiar voice:

“Oi!”

Handshakes and unfathomable explanations from Bluey Clarke, who had materialized in their midst sitting on an upturned Fray Bentos crate. “I slept in a hole,” he blithely announced. “When I woke up I was here.” They pressed him for details of his disappearance and he talked blithely of taking a wrong turn in the dark and ending up in a gully filled with corpses.

As Bluey spoke the major and another officer returned with the unresisting form of George Mullens slumped between. They settled him to the ground and tried to explain:

“He was all right a second ago, wasn't he?”

“He laughed,” complained the tubby captain. “He came to his senses.”

Around the uninjured-seeming form they laced the air with worry. Any moment now, please Christ, it seemed that Mullens would spring to his feet and once again fly. But when the major raised a wing of khaki a flash of red was revealed. As he slid a wallet from the left breast pocket the place flooded with wet colour. “Someone mind this,” he appealed, and the smudged memento passed to Walter who examined it while the officer continued his fretful task of tapping, thrusting, retrieving across the entire person.

Because of the wallet's chance arrival in his hands Walter found himself wondering about the dead man's nerves. It was ordinary — the usual stiff rectangle of muscat-coloured leather opening to display stitched pockets for banknotes, a miniature leather belt and paybook, elastic brace and tiny notebook, and a leather pencil cylinder, its occupant wearing a .22 calibre brass hat. Walter flipped the notebook open and consumed the entries:

October 20:	Left Sydney on “Euripedes” (A14)
October 26:	Arrived Albany
October 31:	Left Albany
November 9:	“Emden” sunk
November 17:	At Colombo
November 25:	Aden
December 2:	Port Said
December 3:	Alexandria
December 4:	Mena Camp
April 4:	Left Mena
April 12:	Arrived Lemnos
April 25:	The day

Not even a thumbprint marked the white silence of the remaining pages. Walter pocketed the pencil because down near the beach he had lost his own.

“Tah,” the filthy hand of Major Mason intruded, “Mullens was a fine soldier.” But a second later he murmured in an aside: “Another dull dog gone.”