Amongst the Dead (2 page)

‘Go ahead,’ Brian said.

‘Earlier this year there was a bloke stationed here at Victoria Barracks — an anthropologist named Bill Stanner. He’d done a lot of work before the war with the natives up north, and he managed to convince the Minister for the Army that what we needed was a special unit that would provide surveillance in the north, in the most rugged and inaccessible parts of the country. We all knew that there were any number of places where the Japs could come ashore, and Stanner argued that the existing coast-watching set-up was woefully inadequate. We knew that, too, of course. Stanner’s idea was to raise a unit of men with bush experience, and to provide them with horses rather than vehicles, because where these blokes would be going, vehicles would be next to useless. Stanner’s plan got up, incredibly, and the North Australia Observer Unit started recruiting back in August. Your brother Fulton was one of those who signed up.’

‘He wouldn’t know one end of a horse from the other,’ I said.

‘Yes, well,’ said Nigella, ‘it was optimistic of Bill to think that he’d get exactly the men he wanted. In the end it was decided that the most critical skill was signalling. If you were adept at Morse, you were in, and you could learn to ride a horse later. The whole point of these Nackeroos, as they call themselves, is that they’re mobile in difficult terrain, and in constant radio contact over great distances. If the Japs land, the Nackeroos’ job is to follow them and report their movements — not engage with them in combat.’

‘This is all new stuff for us,’ said James. ‘The unit’s only just sorting itself out in the field.’

‘How many men are we talking about?’ Brian asked.

‘All up, maybe four hundred and fifty all ranks, maybe seventy-or-so Aboriginal guides, and a few others.’

‘Are you saying that the entire north coast of Australia is being watched by four hundred and fifty men?’ I asked

James Fowler smiled.

‘That’s four hundred and fifty more than before the
NAOU
was formed. I can’t even begin to imagine the conditions under which these blokes are operating, Will. They work mostly in groups of five or six, sometimes fewer, and go out on patrol for weeks at a time. I’m sure most of them thought this would be an adventure. The reports we’re getting, even at this early stage, suggest that life up there is a mixture of privation, terror, and boredom. The thing is this, though: very few people know that the
NAOU
even exists, and it’s important that it stays this way. We don’t want Jap intelligence knowing that there’s a guerrilla waiting to track their every move once they land. These deaths we want you to investigate — they happened in A Company, which is the company your brother is attached to.’

A quizzical expression must have crossed my face.

‘The unit is divided into three companies, A, B and C, and each company has responsibility for a different territory. A Company patrols terrain around the Roper River and up towards Darwin. We’re talking tens of thousands of square miles of mostly unexplored and unmapped territory. The distances are mind-boggling. All the companies are coordinated from Unit HQ in Katherine. I know all this sounds terribly complicated. It’ll become clearer when you get up there.’

‘So you think these deaths are suspicious?’

‘Ah, we know they’re suspicious. What we want to know is whether our suspicions should lean towards fifth-column sabotage or simple psychopathy. That’s what you and Brian will need to find out.’

‘In between singing and dancing,’ Brian said.

James Fowler laughed.

‘It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But, believe me, there are little troubadour groups out and about all over the place. When you get out there you’ll be appreciated, don’t worry about that. But that’s the endgame. You’ve both got a lot to get through before Darwin.’

‘Which brings us, neatly,’ said Nigella, ‘to Corporal Pyers.’

James Fowler picked up the telephone on his desk, waited a moment, and asked for Corporal Pyers to be sent in. The man who entered didn’t immediately inspire confidence. He was unhealthily thin; his uniform was clearly designed to dress a more robust example of the adult male. He looked, frankly, ill. I couldn’t imagine, from the look of him, that he had anything useful to impart. His face glistened with feverish sweat, and his dark eyes were dull with fatigue. I placed him closer to the end of his tether than to its beginning.

‘Corporal Pyers,’ said James Fowler, ‘has recently returned from New Guinea, and is something of a specialist in remote troubadouring. His job is to teach you as much as he can in as short a time as possible.’

It seemed to me that it took all of Corporal Pyers’ skills to ensure continuous inhalation and exhalation, but I refrained from showing even the mildest dubiousness as to his abilities.

‘These are the blokes, are they?’ he asked, and his voice was thin and bland, entirely lacking the depth and sonorousness one would expect from an experienced actor. He shook my hand weakly, one might almost say limply, and then shook Brian’s.

‘I think we should get started immediately,’ Corporal Pyers said, and it didn’t escape my notice that his tone implied that he thought not a moment was to be lost if we were to be brought up to scratch. The sooner I demonstrated the power of one or two speeches from
Timon of Athens
the better.

Both James and Nigella stood up to indicate that the Victoria Barracks part of the proceedings was now at an end, and we were informed that we were to accompany Corporal Pyers into town, to the workshops behind the Tivoli Theatre in Bourke Street.

‘We’ll talk as we walk,’ the good corporal said, although I didn’t see how his health could accommodate both simultaneously.

I shook James’ hand and turned to speak with Nigella; but perhaps fearing that emotion might get the better of her, she’d already reached the door and offered no more than a nod, and a quiet ‘Good luck,’ directed at the room generally rather than at me specifically.

‘You’re to report here at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Sharp. Bring nothing. Your kit will be here, including uniforms, and you’ll have left Melbourne by midday. I hope this isn’t happening too quickly for you.’

Brian said that he couldn’t leave Melbourne quickly enough at the moment, and added that whatever lay ahead had to be an improvement on what lay strewn behind.

Corporal Pyers, or Glen, as he volunteered as soon as we were outside Victoria Barracks and heading into town, observed that it was a measure of how desperate things were that the army was dragooning civilians into the entertainment corps, and that he knew something was wrong when he’d been recalled so quickly from what was supposed to have been a lengthy convalescence.

‘Dengue fever,’ he said. ‘Picked it up in Milne Bay. Christ, what a shithole that is. Believe me, the only thing exotic about New Guinea is the range of diseases you can catch. Copped a fucking terminal dose of khaki dermatitis, too.’

Not wishing to appear completely ignorant of army life, I didn’t inquire as to what exactly khaki dermatitis was. Its name seemed sufficiently self-explanatory to prompt the comment, ‘I suppose it’s a bugger to get rid of,’ from Brian.

‘It is up there, mate. It gets so your balls go mouldy.’

With the unpleasant image of what was lurking behind Glen Pyers’ flies now lodged in my mind, we crossed Princes Bridge, and at his insistence paused for a drink in the bar of Young and Jackson’s Hotel.

‘You two look fit enough,’ he said — a compliment perhaps provoked by Brian’s paying for the beer. ‘I was bloody fit as a Mallee bull before Milne Bay. That was back in August. We hardly got to perform at all up there. I’ve never worked so bloody hard in my life, or been so bloody scared. They had us stretcher bearing, digging, driving, shooting at the fucking Japs — you name it. Got to do a bit of magic here and there, and then this fever hit. Thought I was going to die. Hoped I was, at one stage.’

Before what began to look like a rapid descent into maudlin reflection could gather speed, I distracted Glen by asking him what he meant by ‘magic.’

‘I was a magician on the Tivoli circuit before the war. So that’s what I do in the shows. Bit of mind reading, sleight-of-hand, that sort of thing. What’s your act?’

‘Shakespeare,’ I said.

Glen Pyers laughed.

‘Christ Almighty. You’ll be shot by your own audience if you trot that stuff out.’

‘I think you’d be surprised at how receptive audiences can be.’

‘Well, yes. Yes, I would. And you, Brian? What does the army need you for?’

Brian has always had an alarming tendency to blurt out the truth. Given that we were now, strictly speaking, in the employ of Army Intelligence, and given that we’d been instructed to trust no one — and no one would surely include Corporal Glen Pyers — I experienced a moment of trepidation when I thought Brian was about to reveal that his acquaintance with the great craft of acting came no closer than having been a teacher — a profession notorious, it’s true, for attracting those with the desire to act but without the talent to back it up. Brian looked over his beer at Corporal Pyers, furrowed his brow and, with intense seriousness — as if he were delivering very bad news indeed — said, ‘I’m a comic.’

It took Corporal Pyers’ fevered brain a moment to make sense of the dichotomy between what was said and how it was said, but when he got it he bestowed the acknowledgement of a broad smile.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s see what we can scrounge in the way of dress-ups.’

He led us to the Tivoli Theatre in Bourke Street, an establishment I’d visited only twice before — both times against my will, and both times at the behest of my late father who, when I look back on it, seemed determined to expose me, in the guise of birthday treats, to experiences more calculated to appal and alarm than to reward or entertain.

I think I must have been fourteen when he first took me to the Tivoli, and I distinctly recall letting him know that I thought it common, vulgar, and dull — a formless concatenation of grotesquery. Quite apart from the dreary warbling and mirthless comedians, I have a strong memory of being repulsed by an acrobat of such horrifying spinal elasticity that, with very little effort, he could assume a position where the slightest nudge would result in his head disappearing up his own arse. After the show, I mentioned to my father that vaudeville seemed to be a place where unattractive people with unappealing skills played to undiscerning audiences.

He took me again on my birthday the following year — having forgotten, I suppose, my distaste. I recall, though, that I reiterated it firmly. The year after that, the only thing that prevented, yet again, another visit to the Tivoli was my father’s death. In most respects he was taken too early; in this one, he was taken not a moment too soon.

Brian’s face lit up when he saw the Tivoli bill. He had a taste for the vulgar — witness his now-distracted wife, Darlene. Brian and the Tiv were old friends. He actually insisted that this was what real theatre was all about, not the frightful drawing-room comedies that infested the grander theatres in town. (Not that there was anything on at the moment, grand or otherwise.)

When we reached the theatre it was close to four o’clock, and the two o’clock show had recently released its hostages into Bourke Street. A few of them, including one or two American soldiers, were loitering around the garish billboards which ludicrously declared that the price of a ticket would deliver the extravagance that is the Folies Bergères. What the patron would actually see was a bevy of local girls in skin-coloured body tights, forbidden by law to make a move, with befeathered dancers moving amongst them to the moaning of a popular ballad.

‘This,’ said Brian, ‘is a humdinger of a show.’

I remained silent.

Corporal Pyers led us down the side of the theatre and into a warehouse behind it. This was clearly the storage space and workshop for the theatre. Props leaned against walls, scrims and backdrops were in various stages of being painted or retouched, and racks of costumes were lined up, awaiting repairs.

‘Wait here,’ he said, and disappeared through a door beyond which, I presumed, lay offices. He returned a moment later with a severe-looking woman dressed with the self-conscious eccentricity of a person who believed that employment in any capacity in the theatre demanded quirkiness of appearance. She wore pince-nez that forced her head down to enable her to look over them, and her neck was strangled by a loop of over-sized amber beads — raw, shapeless, and ugly. She might as well have strung links through rubble, and worn that. She was holding a slip of paper, and looked Brian and me up and down.

‘I’m not happy about this, Glen,’ she said, and the familiar way in which she spoke his name indicated prior acquaintance. ‘The army can’t just go on requisitioning our costumes like this. We’re as hard-pressed as everybody else getting decent materials.’

‘This,’ said Corporal Pyers, ‘is Joycey Dover.’

‘I’m William Power,’ I said and held out my hand. She took it, exposing to my notice a ring that looked more like an attachment with a medical purpose than a piece of jewellery.

‘I’m Brian,’ said Brian, and merely nodded.

‘All right,’ said Joycey Dover. ‘What do you need, Glen?’

Glen manoeuvred Brian and me so that we stood back-to-back.

‘Same height, more or less; same weight, more or less; same frame, more or less. This makes things easier. So, one set of tails in my size — black. White’s hopeless. One set in their size. Toppers, of course. Collapsible. That’s all really, Joycey. We haven’t come to strip the cupboard bare.’