Black Diamonds (18 page)

 

FRANCINE

First word from Daniel is a card with camels on the front and it says:
France, if they are ships, then I am a sailor, I reckon. Don't wish you were here — very unattractive, me and the camels. Still, I do, every moment. And the rest, x Daniel.
And there's a tiny sketch beneath showing a soldier leaning over the rails of a ship. So few lines, but somehow I can feel the queasy sway in it. How does he do that? When his handwriting is so outrageously untidy. I've never really noticed that contradiction before, and now here it is, another wonder.

Our notes must have crossed. I want to know what he thinks of my tardily fruitful womb, whether he laughed at my jokes, as if he's just gone off on a lengthy jaunt somewhere, as if he does that regularly. I look at his photograph now, sometimes take it to bed; I've even taken to wearing his old clothes to bed too. Must be a maternal derangement. Good thing I live alone. But then again, I'm a serviceman's wife, aren't I: it's my duty to perform ritual longing, so long as I'm keeping this little home fire burning. I want to know if he's still in Egypt, even though he must be. The news is, Britannia doesn't want to let the AIF be its own big army in charge of itself, but wants it to stay broken up into smaller corps or something, under British Expeditionary Force direction. Seems Australia is not quite grown up enough to go into bat on its own behalf, but there's been a crisis in finding enough British officers to lead these separate corps, so it's all stalled in the desert for Our Boys while they sort it out. I still want to be told that they've become fed up with the mess and called it a draw. But they haven't: Achilles is going to team up with Sisyphus on the Western Front, inevitably. If only it were truly myth, Sister Carmel, and my interpretation
designed only to give the Good Lord cause to regret wasting a mind
on me: Sisyphus isn't rolling a boulder up a hill and watching it fall back down again in this tale: he's trying to cross a line, five hundred miles of it, across France and Belgium, and he needs rather a lot of help just to take a step.

I cry myself to sleep just about every night, diligent home-fire burner that I am. Sarah tells me when she sees my bleary eyes that it's not good for the baby to cry so much, and for the first time I want to shake her and scream at her:
Tell me if you think I can help it.
She's made of stone; no she's not, she's just wiser. I pull away from the hysteria: I remember her face when I told her my first suspicion of pregnancy: thrilled would be putting it mildly. We raced up to Mrs Moran in the Cadillac and I went too fast and nearly hit a dog, and I was Sarah's daughter as she said, ‘Oh Francine, you need something more than spectacles,' then more so as she held my hand while Mrs Moran was extremely efficient about my body and while I laughed as I was embarrassed at her questions, and Sarah softly touched my face with the back of her fingers and laughed too as Mrs Moran proclaimed, ‘Well, if you're not pregnant, you'll make me a liar.' But I went home, alone, because I wanted to be. I wanted to pretend that night that I was waiting for him to come home from the Wattle and I told him, over and over again, in the kitchen, at the door, at the table, in our bed. And Sarah probably knew that too; that she knows so much is not a help: for all my wanting to ask her questions, now I don't want to know. She's not my mother, she's Daniel's mother, and her pain must be larger than mine. I don't even really know what a mother is, and my eyes are raw with all that long-held and withheld wanting too, and the gnaw of barely thought questions: why did you call this house Josie's Place, Father? To keep close to my heart someone I can never ever possibly have? To place me inside a box of loss?

Mr Beckett appears to distract me from myself, however. He's the only person in town who's more insane. I've only known him and his wife Louise for two weeks, and have taken them twice to the large hospital in Bathurst, where Mr Beckett, her Paul, is a curiosity casualty. He knows exactly who I am, and he asks after Danny, and thinks he's going to the mine, where he used to work as wheeler with the ponies. The very quick verdict from the doctor is that nothing can be done for him. Louise tells me that he loves riding in the motor car, that it's the calmest he is ever, and we agree to make a weekly date, just to drive and pretend we're going to the mine to get Danny, for Louise really. I want to ask her what the army is going to do for her and Paul, but that would not help; the army is rather over-busy, and Louise, I think, would just like to drive and have a calm Paul, whatever that means. I find out when we run out of petrol on our first proper outing, thought we'd wend the very long way twenty miles round through to Hartley and back so we never get there, and Paul dives under the car when I say blast it and pull up the brake. Halfway round nowhere, not a house or a track in sight.

He won't come out. Louise says: ‘Paul, we have to get you to work, you'll be late.' She's beside herself but you wouldn't know it unless you'd seen the look on her face when he scrambled out and under, unless you look at her fingernails, which are bitten down to the quick. We look at each other, as you do when you're absolutely bereft. I hear Father Hurley's endorsement of best-intention fibs and I kneel down and stick my head under and say: ‘Beckett, Paul Beckett, you have to help me. Danny wants you to take me to Mrs Moran. I'm having a baby. Now!'

Paul's out in a hurry and he says: ‘Danny? Where is he?'

‘He's in-pit,' Louise says. ‘It'll take him too long to get up, you have to help Francine. Now. We have to go to the hospital.'

‘Well, let's get on then,' says Paul like we're holding up events; I tell him to get in the back and wait, for I need to catch my breath. Truly. But Paul just stands where he is, and watches intently as I flap about for the spare tin can, then spill half its contents on the road. ‘Come on, Paul!' Louise yells as I turn the switch key and fumble for the clutch. He looks at the vehicle and smiles at us both, and gets in the back seat as if nothing had happened. Naturally, the motor then back fires as I accelerate up the hill, but Paul doesn't jump out again: instead he curls up on the floor behind us.

I say to Louise after my heart has stopped charging: ‘You can't live like this.'

‘No,' she says. ‘But there's no other way, is there?'

‘Why not?'

‘The army doctor in Sydney said that Paul's condition might not have been brought about by, you know, said that it was probably just triggered by it, and would have happened at some time anyway. Said his nerves weren't strong enough, but the army can't be responsible for things they don't know about when the men sign up. Still, I'm hoping we'll get a little bit of pension for his service, from the government. That's something.'

Hoping?
And I can't imagine a government pension will compensate for this
something.
I'd stop the motor now and tell her exactly that, but it won't help. I say, because it is the right and only thing to say: ‘If you need anything, anything at all, come to me.' My ancient legal angels will slip it through the large loophole in Father's instructions called
Incapacitating Injuries
and I don't care if I run down the fund; I'll just raise the percentage again.

She answers: ‘What I do need is to get Paul into a sanatorium or an asylum, but no one will take him, even if I could afford it, because he's either not mad enough or not normal enough, according to them, and I've taken him everywhere, in Sydney and the mountains. I've been told that since he shaves and dresses himself and generally does what he's told, he'll come good eventually. I don't believe that and I don't think you can help me there. No one wants to know us — Paul is just too much of a handful. People don't know what to say, even family, his family.'

‘I want to know you,' I say.

She doesn't answer and we don't speak for the rest of the drive, but I am her friend. There is no charity in this: she has my admiration for life.

As we head back down the sweep into Lithgow, inequities slap harder than scars. How is it that Mr Andrew Fisher, our prime minister, could have resigned from office a few months ago, for reasons of ill health, exhausted by the war and his long and illustrious political career? Too tired to go on. Poor lamb. And, wouldn't you know it, he was a coalminer once too. Where's his bottle gone? Now Billy Hughes, the former attorney-general, has taken his place and is pushing for conscription.
Conscription?
He used to be some sort of a union man, didn't he? Cream rising to the top? Or curds? I can see his photograph: he looks like a wizened little troll and, call me flighty, but I doubt that he'll be asking the AIF to be careful to vet those with possible dodgy nerves. What does the war mean to him? Maybe it's just a matter of being the prime minister; of showing Blighty that we're made of even stronger stuff than the last prime minister showed. Of being too busy with all that to see the likes of Paul Beckett. I can see Paul Beckett, though, when I look behind me, and as he was standing just now by the car; I can even see a memory of him running round the paddock kicking a football around with Daniel and the others: he's ordinary, not short, not tall, not fair, not dark, nobody, except Louise's Paul.

Nationalists sing ‘Advance Australia Fair' but who's making things fair for those who can't advance? Those who can't have
wealth for toil?
How can it be left up to those who need help to help themselves when they're helpless and alone? And why should they be alone, when they did exactly what was asked of them: served their country? That's not a tangle: it's a fairly straightforward betrayal.
Australian sons
exchange
young and free
for nothing. I remember reading something recently about a returned serviceman's league being set up in Brisbane, to provide help for those who've come home to governmental abandonment. There's a circle: leave one union to go to war, then come home and have to start up another to try to help you find what you once had: a job. That's only if you're well enough to work, though. Even if there was a league like that here, what could they do for Paul Beckett?

He kills himself with his razor the following week, putting a full stop on that question and the wind up me. I write an angry diatribe to the
Herald
; it's not published. I write slightly less impassioned letters to the local member, the New South Wales premier, the prime minister and the leader of the opposition; I don't get a single reply. Not sure if it was my tone or the subject of suicide that put them off, but I've got a more important matter to attend to anyway: Louise.

She is not so much devastated as in a kind of deep, silent shock. Her hands tremble like a drunk's as she makes tea in the house near the top of Dell Street. She is quietly mad now too, and destitute: not so much in immediate financial terms since she and Paul had only got married just before he signed up, and they'd still been living with his parents, but because she has no place here any more and has no idea what to do next. Her mother-in-law behaves as though Louise herself has done this to her son, and wants her to leave. The black-clad crow says as she watches Louise: ‘There are positions advertised at the mills.' Meaning setting the machines for the production of Our Khaki, which would earn Louise a tidy pittance, enough to move into a boarding house. Forget that for a bad joke. I say, ‘I'm in need of domestic assistance, actually,' and stare hard at Louise. I mouth at her: ‘Come and live with me.' We can be lunatics together.

She does, in a daze, and she doesn't care that I wear Daniel's trousers to bed and sleep with his photograph. This is all quite normal.

‘These are lovely,' she says to me, looking at Daniel's carvings on the top of the piano. She's hardly said a word in these first few weeks but she looks now at least as if she's stopped holding her breath.

I say: ‘Yes. They're Daniel's.'

There's the one of me, and then there's a tiny pyramid he carved in Egypt; it came a little while after the camel card, with a note saying:
Well, here it is, France. A wonder of the ancient world. No nasty surprises. But too b. hot for this slave and I am in terrible need of too much tarragon. Stop blinking at me or I'll go mad. I'm that bored. If you were running the shop, I wouldn't be. x Daniel. PS: Please send food, I really am starving.

Then there's one of a tent, small too, and when I look at it I can feel the wind and sand against the part-opened flap. Note said:
Nothing has changed. Stop blinking at me. You'll have me sent home. Keep blinking. x Daniel.
No mention of the cake or silly love note and extra socks I sent him; maybe the package didn't get there. Still no idea if he even knows I'm pregnant.

My willow face looks at the pyramid and the tent in contemplation, as if I've just had a thought as to how to make sense of the objects in front of me.

I start to tear up and Louise gives me a hug. ‘It's all right, you know. Don't hold back on my account. I might like to join you from time to time.' So we lose it like girls today, for a good long while.

Baby is a tight round bump in my tummy when I finally receive the note from Marseilles that says:
Took me a few moments to respond to your alarming news. Knocking on wood myself now, and I think your timing is just perfect. So, France at last — took the long way round the block to find you this time. I'll never do that again. But as they say, better late than never. Still, I didn't get crook the whole way across the Mediterranean — must suit me better round here. I'll take that as an omen, thank you. Enjoy getting fat, wish I could join you. Can you have another photograph done so that I can see what you look like? Missing you doesn't quite describe it.
There's a sketch on the next page: of me,
getting fat
; it's a simple nude, with a caption underneath saying
Vive la France.
And a PS right at the very bottom:
But you had better keep your kit on for the photo, I suppose.
Then a PPS:
Better send me something decent to eat too, or I might not be around to receive it.