Amongst the Dead (15 page)

I NEEDN’T HAVE WORRIED
about having to ride on one of the horses. The weight on their backs, and the oppressive heat, meant that we walked beside them. Fulton said that we’d be lucky to do twenty miles a day.

During the first hour of our exodus we passed through tall grass over terrain that was flat, and it wasn’t very arduous. When the grass gave way to trees it was necessary to watch the horses carefully. Several of them attempted to divest themselves of their loads by squeezing between two trees, in order to dislodge the protruding weights. One of the horses succeeded, and time was lost as it was reloaded and disciplined into walking on. With surprising suddenness we found ourselves in dense scrub — a species of low-growing and prickly wattle — and the good sense in wearing protective clothing became clear. The Nackeroos seemed to know where they were going, which was just as well, because if someone had spun me around I’d have had no idea what direction I was facing.

Around midday we came to the first of many streams we’d have to cross. It was wide, but it didn’t appear to be flowing very rapidly. In the dry months, Rufus said, this creek didn’t flow at all. I found this astonishing as the volume of its flow gave the impression of permanence. Isaiah’s experienced eye declared it shallow enough to permit fording without the horses having to swim. They stretched out along the creek’s edge, and lowered their heads to drink.

No one saw the crocodile until it was too late. It rose from the water, its jaws agape, with the awful and monstrous precision of its kind. The horse that was its target, one of the few with nothing on its back, raised its head too slowly to avoid having its face clamped between the jagged vice of the reptile’s jaw. A brutal twist knocked the horse off its feet and, flailing and whinnying, it was dragged into deeper water where, in a matter of seconds it was silenced. The only sound we could hear was the thrashing of the crocodile as it repositioned its grip and headed for the opposite bank. There was panic amongst the remaining horses, and they bolted. Stunned by the force of this thing which had erupted from the creek, I stood rooted to the spot, staring at the place where moments before a stocky Waler had stood drinking.

‘The horses!’ Nicholas Ashe yelled. ‘Get the fucking horses!’

It took an hour, but all the horses were rounded up and assembled again at the edge of the creek. The thickets of ti-tree and wattle had served as a natural barrier against a free bolt, so none of the mounts had made it very far.

We were all shaken by the incident, and the knowledge that we had no choice but to cross the creek made me quake in my boots — literally. I could feel my ankles knocking against the high leather.

‘Boots off, boss,’ Ngulmiri said, and made a sucking noise to indicate the effect of thick mud. Very few words were spoken as we began the crossing. Having been given a rifle, I felt marginally less terrified, and my fear was soon replaced by sharp, insistent little stabs of pain as razor-like shells bit into the untempered soles of my feet. All I could think of was infection, and this took my mind off predation.

When we were a safe distance away on the far side, and in drier country where crocodiles were unlikely to lurk, we stopped, stood close together and, inexplicably, began to laugh. While Isaiah and Ngulmiri watched the horses, which grazed on a good swathe of Mitchell grass, we boiled a billy of tea and dunked army biscuits in the hot, bitter brew.

Late in the afternoon we came upon an immense billabong, its surface alive with countless thousands of water fowl — chiefly magpie geese and Burdekin ducks. The horses were watered with vigilance, and we all swam briefly in, for me, a confusing blend of relief and fear. Afterwards, Nicholas Ashe shot three Burdekin ducks — an action that took no skill. Firing a shotgun into so dense a flock was bound to get results, although he dropped the chestnut-and-white birds at our feet with the flourish of a sharpshooter. They were rather beautiful creatures, I thought, with pink legs, and bills the colour of pale flesh. Isaiah was told to pluck and gut them, and he did so, close to a fire he’d built so that maggots mightn’t be deposited on them even while he was dressing them for the pot. (The cooked ducks were greasy in the end, and I decided that the next time they were on the menu I’d take charge of their preparation, and engage either Isaiah or Ngulmiri to help cook them carefully.)

The tedious work of unloading the horses was done quickly, and methylated spirits was rubbed into their backs — a measure taken to harden their skin. The radio was set up, and Ashe volunteered to man it. It was impossible to say if the temperature dropped as the sun set because, again, we were dressed in multiple layers.

I was assiduous in applying disinfectant powder to the cuts and abrasions on my feet, and both Brian and Glen followed my example. The three Nackeroos didn’t bother — their hardened feet might have suffered less than ours.

Without my noticing, both Isaiah and Ngulmiri had constructed low, paperbark shelters over which they’d thrown a good covering of grass. They took turns horse-tailing throughout the night, constantly swatting at mosquitoes with the amputated wings of the Burdekin ducks, and crawling between shifts into their relatively insect-free grass and bark domes. We suffocated again under cheesecloth, and during the night I was disturbed by the eerie and unsettling bellowing of crocodiles.

The following morning I woke to discover that the boots I’d foolishly left outside my covering had been fly-struck and, having no way of knowing whether I’d removed all the maggots from the recesses of the toes, I was obliged to put my feet into them and hope that there weren’t so many that they’d be squashed into a foul mousse.

The morning’s walking was uneventful, if arduous, broken only by the passing overhead of a noisy, creaking flock of glorious, red-tailed black cockatoos, too numerous to count.

It rained not long after we’d moved on from lunch. It was another ferocious, obliterating downpour which created flows of water around our feet that might easily have been mistaken for the overflow from a nearby river. I was reassured by the Aborigines’ and the Nackeroos’ calm maintenance of an even pace forward that we weren’t going to be swept away by a wall of water rolling over us.

When the rain stopped, the air became so thickly humid that it was difficult to breathe. I was looking down at the ground, following the heels of Brian’s boots in front of me and allowing my mind to wander in the direction of Fulton’s paternity — an absurd and pointless indulgence when I knew that I was in the company of a murderer, and determining the murderer’s identity ought to have been my paramount concern. I’d had only the briefest of conversations with Brian the previous evening for, despite there being so few of us, we were never far enough from each other to make conversation of a sensitive nature possible or safe.

The real reason, probably, for my pondering the question of Fulton’s paternity was that I was vaguely ashamed to discover that its uncertainty made it easier for me to accept that he must be amongst the suspects. After all, there wasn’t a wide field from which to choose. I’d eliminated the Aboriginal men — I couldn’t imagine either of them suiting themselves up in someone’s gear (and where would they get it from anyway?) — so the only possible suspects were Fulton, Rufus Farrell, and Nicholas Ashe. I established a hierarchy of likely culprits, with Ashe at its head, Rufus Farrell some way down, and Fulton only on the list because he was present at the time of the murder.

I looked up and watched Fulton walking beside a horse several feet in front of me. He must have felt my gaze because he turned around and smiled at me. I wonder, I thought, if I actually like you, now that I’m not obliged to. But I rejected this as mean and irrational. We did have the same mother, after all, and our mother’s features were unmistakably present in Fulton’s handsome face, obscured though it was by his dark beard.

‘Boss!’ Isaiah called from the front of the line of horses. ‘Crash, boss!’

We moved up and saw, a short distance away, the wreckage of an aircraft. Almost simultaneously, the air was tainted with the foul smell of something dead. Ashe instructed Isaiah and Ngulmiri to stay with the horses and to take the opportunity to shift the accumulators onto a fresh remount. The six of us cautiously approached the mangled aircraft, hearing the unmistakeable murmurings of blowflies smug and secure in the convenience of their find.

‘Is it a Zero?’ I asked.

Rufus shook his head.

‘It’s American. A B25 Mitchell bomber.’

‘How many people would have been on board?’ Brian asked.

‘Three. Pilot, navigator, gunner.’

Our noses and ears told us that there were no survivors, and from the shattered wreckage it was obvious that no one could have walked away. It was Rufus who clambered up and peered into the cockpit.

‘Two blokes here,’ he said. ‘Sort of.’

Glen, who’d wandered away a little, called, ‘Body over here!’

I saw him discreetly vomit. I went across to where he was, and found there the charred and bloated remains of an airman. He must have been thrown clear on impact. It wasn’t possible to determine his age or to discern any features that were recognisably human. If it weren’t for the burnt and tattered remains of his flying suit, I mightn’t even have been sure that what lay before me was a creature of my own species.

‘This must have happened days, maybe even a week, ago,’ I said. I placed one hand over my nose and mouth, and retrieved the dead man’s dog tag, which had dropped into his chest cavity and balanced there on a piece of exposed rib, scorched and tarnished against that white protrusion. I poked at what remained of his clothing with a stick, but could find no other identification. If he’d been carrying a wallet or a photograph, it had been burnt into ashes indistinguishable from the ashes around it. At least his family would know what had happened to him. He was doubtless a young man in his early twenties; soon, somewhere far way in America, a telegram would be delivered, and someone would be reduced to inconsolable days of inexpressible grief.

We buried the three airmen in the sludge that was the earth. The two who’d remained strapped in the cockpit came away in ghastly sections. They, too, had been badly burned; one of them carried a wallet that had somehow survived, but all it contained was a small photograph of a young man with his arm around the shoulders of a severe, older woman — his mother, we presumed, unless, as Ashe crassly noted, he was sexually attracted to the elderly.

Fulton put their dog tags in his pocket and, because there was nothing else we could do, we went on our way, having been delayed by death yet again.

The terrain began to change, so subtly that it was only when I looked behind me that I realised we’d been climbing a gentle incline. The landscape stretched out at our backs in an endless expanse of red, brown, and yellow ground, daubed here and there with smoky greens.

I contrived to fall in beside Brian at the rear of the group, temporarily out of earshot of the others. ‘At least we know the intelligence about suspicious deaths up here was right,’ I said.

‘Battell’s the fourth, right?’

‘The fourth we know about, and we’re down to three suspects. We both need to be very careful, Brian. Me especially, now that he knows I saw him leave Battell’s tent.’

‘And you have no idea who it was?’

‘The only part of him that was visible was his hands, and I was too far away to see if there was anything distinguishing about them.’

We were speaking quietly, but Brian lowered his voice even further to say, ‘You mean two suspects, don’t you? We can eliminate Fulton, surely. He’s our brother.’

‘Apparently that’s only half true. What else don’t I know about him?’

Brian dismissed the question with a wave of his hand.

‘He’s our brother, Will. What does it matter if he’s lucky enough not to have our father’s blood running through his veins?

‘And whose blood does run there?’

The look Brian gave me was eloquent in his assessment of me as being simple-minded.

‘Are you serious, Will? It’s Peter Gilbert, of course. How could you not know that? How could you have lived in the same house I did and not know that Dad barely acknowledged Fulton? Fulton would have been, what, five when Dad died? I was just a kid, Will, but I didn’t see Dad so much as speak to Fulton.’

‘He knew? Dad knew that Peter Gilbert and Mother were having an affair?’

‘He knew. I don’t think he cared particularly. He was a cold bastard.’

My instinct was to defend the man to whom I was regularly compared. My will had been subjected to the enervating humidity, and I couldn’t summon the energy to do so. In truth, I couldn’t recall much, if anything, about our father that would generate a fond reminiscence. I couldn’t accuse him of overt cruelty — he never struck me, and I don’t recall him ever raising his voice. Nevertheless, my strongest memories are of outings calculated to frighten, appal, embarrass or, worse, bore me, and all undertaken with the cruel pretence that they were celebrations of my birth.

My silence must have discomposed Brian, or perhaps he thought his remarks about our father had offended me, because he said, ‘You’re not like him, Will. Not really. I think he was probably kindest to you.’

‘This is a strange place to be talking about our father.’

Brian laughed.

‘I can’t think of a better one.’ He paused. ‘But you do look like him. I think that’s why Mother doesn’t like you.’