1915 (38 page)

“He was shot in the head, leaving a sort of pink bare patch.” Ethel demonstrated by tugging back her hair. “He used to be such good fun. But now that he's not in his right mind he's like a stranger. It took him a minute to remember my name.”

The telephone jangled, causing Ethel to give a small squeak of surprise and cover her mouth: “I thought it was the doorbell. Sometimes when I talk about people they suddenly turn up. Oh dear,” she giggled.

 

“Happy New Year,” said the man in the bow tie who stood next to Billy at the railing of the ferry.

“New Year?” Billy replied, stepping closer and peering into the man's face. He scrutinized polished cheeks above bushy whiskers, and dwelt for an eternity on the intricate plaid patterning of the coat which the man had slung across one shoulder in the heat.

Then the man was gone, and blue water turned to green as it arrived swollen alongside the ferry. A seabird glided down and clawed the top of a pile before alighting. The ferry stopped, trembled, and set off again, rounding a familiar rocky point. Bushlined shore slid past, filling Billy's gaze with tangled scrub as if the boat had chugged into a creek on the other side of the mountains. It was not the New Year yet, but the day before. What was the day before called? Billy's mind worked differently now, the simplest answers eluding him. Even to move his arms and legs, especially
on the left side, took an effort of thought. But while memories were hard to grasp, feelings came easily. Rage and bewilderment sped through his mind like wintry clouds. Sometimes he believed again that he had killed Walter during those last moments at the Balkan Gun Pits. He was forced to relive the agony that had possessed him in the months that followed, before word of Walter's imprisonment had come through.

Two children came onto the deck to stare at him. Billy tapped the bewhiskered man on the shoulder to ask what day it was, but when he turned around it was someone else. The ferry jarred against another set of wharf pilings and set off one of those dull, nauseating headaches that often made him weep.

Then he found himself thumping across the flimsy footbridge at the head of Mosman Bay having missed his stop and been told of a pleasant walk around the treeclad foreshore. He climbed stone steps clear of a band of tide-smelling air and entered leafy shade. Here he paused and unbuttoned his fly, sending a stream of water onto fat green leaves and enjoying the sound it made. He felt better. A swarm of bees had established a hive on a branch above his head, their combs grey as soap in the sunlight. A few yards away a man and a woman sat on a rock pretending not to notice. When Billy walked past, the man tipped his hat to the uniform while the woman stared red-faced into her lap.

Farther on Billy sat on a fallen log to puzzle over a picture that suddenly entered his mind: a butcher carrying a bloodied side of beef off into nothingness, the beef wearing clothes. Next Billy found himself flat on his stomach on the path, tracing a spiral on the sandstone gravel with a short stick. An ant crawled up his trouser leg but what did it matter? Then someone
was poking him in the ribs with a cane.

“Are you all right?”

It was the man in the bow tie. Billy suddenly recognised him, and almost spoke his name. He had met him near here before, at the Reillys'.

“What do they call the day before New Year's Day?” asked Billy from his back. “You know — today.”

“New Year's Eve.”

Billy sprang upright and dusted himself, shaking the man's hand and winking to show that he too was aware that to lie prone on a path at the height of a mid-summer's day was none too sensible.

“Are you sure you're all right?”

“Capital.”

“May I talk with you?”

Billy shrewdly pointed out that the man had come from the opposite direction and would be wasting his time. Then he stepped off with a smart salute. But around the next bend he came to a fork in the track and slowed with a chuckle for the nosy Harry Crowell to catch up. Billy congratulated himself on getting the name right. Somehow it proved that he was going at things in the right way, despite his sense of falling asleep and then waking in a place or in the midst of some action he could make no sense of. When he was sure that Harry had glimpsed him he quickened his pace, ducked behind a bush, and watched his pursuer stride past just a few feet away. Then he doubled back to the lower track and made his way swiftly to the Reillys'.

When Billy saw the house he realized his mistake — he had forgotten his rifle. Therefore he broke into a run but tripped over, then picked himself up and limped
swearing across the grass where a year before Robert Gillen had played at being a cowboy. A second later he was through the back door and into the kitchen, where he leaned on the table to catch his breath.

Laughter and piano music reached him from the front of the house. He was in good humour. He felt at ease in a familiar place. What could be more pleasant than to saunter through to the living room and enjoy the entertainment?

Ethel saw him first and stifled a shriek.

Frances looked up from the music and said quietly, “Please give me the knife.” Billy seemed to realize only then that the object he had collected from the kitchen table was a carving knife. He held it out, then changed his mind.

Frances accidentally struck a key as she stood.

“It's New Year's Eve,” slurred Billy. “What about a medley?”

“Let's sit and talk.” Ethel had recovered herself enough to exchange glances with Frances. “Have you written to Uncle Hugh?”

“Who,” Billy seemed to say, “who hoo is Hugh?” Then he said it again, for they must understand that this was an echo from inside his head.

“Your father.”

Billy rested the knife on his lap. The faces opposite seemed unaccountably hostile; one framed by dark hair, severely frowning, the other sending quick glances towards the door like an untrustworthy kelpie about to dart free. To prove his good intentions Billy placed the knife on a low table, but when Frances moved towards it he shifted his hand warningly and she sank back in her chair. If only they understood the effort needed to sit here, thought Billy, they would treat me better.

“We missed you yesterday,” said Frances striving to be sensible. “Were you well looked after? I suppose the flowers lasted no time at all. Have you heard any news of Walter?” Billy stared at her. He wondered why another person was not in the room — that tall olive skinned woman who played the piano, whose daughter had been Diana's friend.

“Flowers?” he mumbled.

“Our baskets wilted in the heat even though we sprinkled them with water. The ladies here go into their gardens cutting them at dawn. You can't imagine the trouble they take. Such a waste,” she concluded, addressing the remark to Ethel because Billy was not listening.

But he was listening. Trapped in an airless room he heard the faint rumble of guns along a horizon of steel and shuddered in recollection of the scenes that had greeted him in August, when he was sent to be a sniper among the hills above Suvla Bay. Then as now the sound seemed to rise through his blood rousing the awfulness of terror until it intensified into a shout:

“It's a tram!” Frances yelled, her face inches away: “Only a tram.” Her hands gripped his shoulders as the tram whined past the house and down to the wharf.

“You poor man,” murmured Frances, at the same time nodding to Ethel who snatched up the carving knife and carried it from the room. Frances felt Billy sink listlessly under her hold. For a moment it seemed he would be calm. But her closeness, her curves and odours, at last awoke him to her identity — that person who had thwarted his one attempt to escape from the prison of himself.

Enraged he rose from the chair and knocked her down with a blow to the side of the head.

Ethel heard Frances's scream from the kitchen and ran back through the unfamiliar rooms taking a wrong turn into the shuttered dining room where the table was covered in dark velvet like the resting place of a coffin: then she slithered on the hall carpet, still holding the knife, hearing the maid Helen thump downstairs as the front doorbell suddenly rang and a fist pounded on the leaded glass demanding entry, and at last she entered the gloomy parlour to see Frances spreadeagled on the floor with Billy crouched over her, his hands clamped on her neck and his shoulders powerfully arched as if he were tightening a bolt or advancing a ratchet to its utmost. Frances's wide eyes stared past Billy's shoulder straight into Ethel's, her face swollen and dusky. The only sounds were Billy's heavy breathing and a rasp of noise from Frances. Then Ethel threw herself at Billy's back. Billy reared up, flinging her off as if she were a terrier, and the knife, still gripped in Ethel's determined hand, tore through the carpet before its point stuck fast.

Now Billy swung his fists at Ethel and the horrible welt on his head darkened. Frances, gulping breath in the corner where she had crawled, wondered why it was that Billy's ferocious swings seemed unable to reach Ethel's face. Then she saw that Harry Crowell had sprung from nowhere to grip him around the waist with his powerful arms.

A second later Billy and Harry were fighting. A pair of glass vases crashed to the floor. Two weighty encyclopaedias toppled one after another from the bookshelf, then lay with their pages doubled up like crushed noses. Harry sat on the piano, striking a deep chord. Ethel hugged Frances in the corner. When Billy finally lay slumped in a chair, as if dozing, they heard
Helen shriek “Police!” into the telephone.

Billy's nose had flooded red. The head wound which had been split open during the fight wept a watery pink substance. Ethel held towels to his lolling face while Harry tied double knots in the silk curtain cords that bound him hand and foot. When at last Billy's eyes opened he did not speak, but looked at each of them with the air of a person who has made the effort of his life to correct a wrong, but has failed, leaving all as it was before.

 

Whistles and bells greeted the New Year — hooters, fireworks across the still water, banged saucepan lids, and someone on a rooftop crowing like a rooster. At the Reillys' no such response was forthcoming. Mrs Reilly sat at the piano with the windows open to the moonlit garden, allowing a Chopin nocturne to flow across the unheralded stroke of midnight.

Harry stood on the dewy grass smoking a last cigar. The doctor had come and gone, Ethel slept in the spare room. Frances, following a drugged dreamless slumber, awoke, listened to the music, and after a while climbed from her bed and went to the window. She had been forbidden to watch Billy leave but had forced herself — and had seen a bag of equipment being carted away, mason's tools or cricketing gear strapped in canvas; something inert and useless, its purpose abandoned. The men who tied him into his straitjacket were gentle but they were used to the work, and it seemed horrible. Now Billy was in the asylum.

She cried. The effort caused her throat to ache unbearably. She sat in the open window bathing her
arms in coolness as she had countless times before, and saw Harry's cigar tip glow and fade, and then his shadowy form moving back into the house. In the quiet following the fight, during their half hour wait for rescue, Harry had announced his intention to go to England as a volunteer munitions worker. His face had been stern — nothing like the old nervous Harry at all. It was the war. How people needed it! Even when they saw that it destroyed people they needed it. Why else would patriotic soldiers missing an arm or a leg wave their crutches from recruiting platforms? Even Billy, that sullen madman, half the time unconscious of his surroundings, carried the war with him and still tried to obey its simple imperative. Ethel alone seemed to understand the mood Frances now found herself in. They talked about taking a holiday together — of going somewhere where there were no people. Ethel said she wished she had dreamed Walter and Billy dead, it would have been better. Walter would return, she knew, when the war was done, and his unhappiness would take a different form from Billy's but it would be just as awful.

The piano music stopped. Mrs Reilly walked to the gate with Harry. Frances heard one word, “Gallipoli”, before Harry set off on his walk home. Her mother drifted back towards the house, pausing for a moment to stamp on the cigar stub smouldering in the wet grass. Frances was unable to call to her, but thankfully she began again the beautiful music which Frances at last knew was beyond her own reach — those notes of ivory and glass that had been created in a distant world no different from this one, where contact between people, beginning in kindness and curiosity, suddenly burst into a crescendo of cruelty and destruction.

“Dear Miss Reilly,” Oliver Melrose had written, “I was surprised, not to say pleased, to get a letter from you, as I was quite unaware that Walter had mentioned my name. Your letter was pleasant, interesting and sane, so different from those of the misguided but well-meaning girls who write to ‘lonely soldiers' without saying anything, or else making them feel lonelier. Perhaps you don't know that I'm in Egypt at present; wounded …”

Frances shifted position on the windowledge. She touched her raw throat and drew her legs up, wrapping her arms around them. Then with care she rested her chin on her knees. Along a reach of harbour she saw the dark shape of a barge being propelled by a tug. How many months had passed since her last dream of sailing away? What would she do with herself? The tug entered a shaft of moonlight and darkened even more. How odd that light should do away with mysterious detail, leaving only a hard black outline. She was tired, and dozed for a second before waking with a start. Then she made her way back to bed.

“Concerning Walter,” the letter had concluded, “about whom you ask most nicely. He went missing at the point I was getting to know him. It was the devil's job to make his acquaintance, and we used to fight, but in that unpleasant place the fights never last. He went the way of thousands and when he was gone nobody gave him a thought. Does that sound hard? There's no morality in all this. When word came through of his capture we cursed his luck, being out of it, but then gave a thought to the Unspeakable who fenced him in, and felt a little sorrier. That's about the depth of things in this surprising world, at least till the present madness runs its course. Come to England when it's done, I'm
going to settle there, and we'll pretend that nothing has happened. Have you ever run gaily over an ant heap, dashing towards a pretty flower or (pardon me) to the arms of a lover? Your dainty tread, etc. Until then we are the ants.