Black Diamonds (20 page)

He says: ‘You haven't by any chance …'

What.

‘… ever played rugby?'

I think I might have. I say: ‘What?' just at the question, throwing me.

He says: ‘I didn't imagine so.'

I say: ‘No, I've played rugby. But why are you asking?'

He says: ‘Union? Thug's Rugby rugby rugger et cetera?'

Like I might not know the difference. I say: ‘Very probably.'

Chuckle, chuckle: ‘Of course, and I'd put you in the second row.'

‘That'd be right.' What is it about me that even here, with a bloke who talks in riddles at me, it's assumed that I am second row: do I look as though I must enjoy having my head wedged between the arses of a front row?

‘Excellent,' he says. ‘Would you like to play for Australia tomorrow?'

What?
No. I'd like to go to sleep and have my day off; I couldn't think of anything worse right now than running anywhere. But this is Rugby
rugby
, as in playing the gentlemen, with the gentlemen. I know I wouldn't be asked unless a spot for a big bloke needed filling, and unless Dunc could see an opportunity for his own amusement in it, but I might never get another opportunity to have a go at this, so: ‘Who we playing?'

‘Blighty.'

Twist my arm. Go on.

So these are the gentlemen's rules for today's friendly match between Australia and Great Britain. First, if you play for Australia and didn't go to King's, or Newington, or Brisbane Grammar, or Scots College, where Dunc went, you're an idiot: that's me. One and only. Hired help, making up a very small number in a spare blue-and-maroon that's too small, until they realise you can actually play. Except they don't tell you that; they just suddenly start letting you go for a run with the ball. Again, and again, and again. Very enjoyable for me up until confrontation with the second rule: if you play for Great Britain it's acceptable rucking behaviour, apparently, to lay the boot very hard and repeatedly into the kidneys of the opposition in full view of the referee, who happens to be a Kiwi, and either has a very confused sense of loyalty or is completely blind. The first time it happens you let it go — could have been unintentional. The second time it happens, you lose your temper. Well, I do: ring-in Wallaby goes right off at this particular Lion. And I get sent right off, ten minutes into the second half. Not that it matters: it's a walkover for Australia anyway, forty-two to six. But there's rule number three: hired help is not invited to the officers' mess for the celebration.

Dunc says: ‘Come on in. No one's going to object.'

I tell him: ‘Except me.'

He says, chuckle: ‘Don't take it so hard. You played well, very well in fact — that's all that matters. Great show. You'll definitely be asked back.'

‘And I'll definitely say no thanks.'

‘Why?'

‘I've had a very good lesson in authority. You were very right in saying that I would not want my wife to hear I was killed
skylarking
about on a bicycle, just as I would not want her to hear that I was kicked to death by a British officer.'

He says: ‘It wasn't that bad a knock, surely?'

I lift up the back of the jersey to show him, mostly because I'm wondering why it still hurts to stand upright.

He says: ‘Oh. You'd better get that seen to.'

Yes. I do. And I'm off for a few days pissing blood.

Not very useful at all.

Except in one way: the whole company finds it amusing. Not the damage to my kidneys, mind, but that I king-hit a BEF lieutenant colonel and got away with it.

Not laughing now.

Another letter from France, just before we move on again. She says:

Darlingest Daniel,

I'm not knocking on wood any more, but trusting that you will come home. You can be sure that every minute awake or asleep that is what I am thinking of. You should also know that without you I wouldn't be who I am. I shudder to think of how different I would be had I not stumbled around the back of your house that day and seen you sitting there carving. And the rest of you! How different things would be if Father had not brought you home that horrible day, had I stayed that rude, spoiled girl who couldn't say thank you to a miner in the street. Luck has been on our side from the first, well, almost, and there's no reason it should run out now. If luck does run out here, and this is the one and only time I am going to say or think it, then I want you to know now that we've already had the best. A lavish best. The rest just doesn't matter. No one on this earth could have given me the joy you already have. Except perhaps our baby, who is kicking me indignantly right now as a reminder.

I do understand your dilemma now, and more than that, I am proud to be married to someone who would do such a brave thing despite all his misgivings. I was angry and hysterical but that's only because I didn't want you to go. Fair enough, too. But since you've left I've done even more growing up. I won't bore you with the details; suffice to say that your ‘stupid' decision hasn't been all bad at this end. Nothing with us is ever bad. The greatest gift you've given me is that in virtually everything you do you make me think harder and work harder. And that is what I will continue to do regardless.

You will come home, and you will behave yourself. I want you to do something different when you do; I want you to study, to sit on the verandah and carve and draw, do the things you need to do to bring you out of your state of ‘stupidity'. And there's not going to be any argument about it. You've done your bit already, for everyone, and you deserve to know what it is you're really blessed with. For now, you can go back to shovelling dirt or whatever filthy thing it is you're doing, but you've been warned.

You are right: love's just not a word for us, it's more magical than that — and I'm not afraid to use its power. Baby should arrive in about a month's time — wish me, us, luck.

Your very wise, very beautiful, very demanding France.

Duncan walks in and catches me having a bit of a moment with myself and my France and wondering if the date makes me a father yet, and I'm just holding it in. If he wants a word with me right now, I'm going to job him and take my court martial all the way home. He sees, I think, and pisses off.

Things have got worse, did so to be sure I wouldn't miss it, and I'm just about feeling my luck has reached its limit. But I'm doing very well on my list of things I didn't want to do while I was here. Last night I lost three men in one go. There wasn't anything I could have done about it, or maybe there was. But it's … the worst. We were re-rigging entanglements one moment, we'd almost worked our way backwards to our line, me and Anderson up one end and two others, Smithy and Durban, at the other, not much more than a spit away, when Fritz decided to make a big move ahead of ours. The sky lit up like daylight and the wall of noise from both sides was enough to break bones, but it was all happening at least two hundred yards or so south, Fritz clearly determined to blast his way through the wire there, and there was a deep empty trench just a hop behind us so we tried to hurry it up and get it done before scarpering. No, not we, I yelled out to them and signalled to them to hurry it up, since we'd nearly finished anyway. Then a stray shell wiped out Smithy and Durban; I watched it hit them, where they were, whacking in the last corkscrew on their side, and felt the wire rip across my hands as Anderson and I got knocked backwards into the trench, which I then scrambled over the back of as it began to collapse. I couldn't see Anderson: the whole thing had collapsed as far as I could see back that way. He should have been no more than five yards away from me. And then Fritz doesn't light any more flares, since he'd decided at that moment to finish his fireworks, so I couldn't see a fucking thing till my eyes adjusted to the dark again. I jumped back in anyway and started digging but I couldn't find him. Kept going till I did. And he was dead, the corkscrew he'd been holding rammed into his chest, propping him up in the hole I'd made around him.

Would it have mattered if we'd all hopped into the trench, which was the only place to go? Was it a stray shell or did I draw fire when I yelled out: ‘Stay.' Couldn't have been that: Fritz is accurate, but not that accurate. I'll never know, though. There was that much noise and light. But still, I'll never know.

And then it got worse from there. I left Anderson where he was, had to, and belted back through the relative quiet, which consisted of intermittent machine-gun fire at who knows what from who knows where, and dived in with the infantry, just in time for Fritz to commence part two of his objective.

‘Good of you to drop in,' said this Tommy corp, still dragging on his smoke, leaning back against the rear wall, like he'd just kipped through part one. Then he pushes himself up, leans forwards on his elbows to aim, as they all are down the line, and yells down at me as the shelling starts up from behind and the machine-gunners give it all either side: ‘You could make yourself handy.'

I could. I couldn't have done anything else really, since the trench was clogged full of rifles, other than go over the back and make a decent target of myself, or wait for them to go right over the top so I could get past. Couldn't say
Sorry, mate, I'm not an assault pioneer, see this little purple patch on my shoulder, says I'm an
engin
eer.
Couldn't just stand there like an idiot. So I got up with them like an idiot, and when I saw the shapes running out at us through the mad flashes of light, I can say that I had no trouble firing, and I doubt very much that I was shooting like a girl. No idea if I actually hit anyone, but it wouldn't have been for lack of trying.

What did Fritz achieve last night other than killing three Australian sappers in the wrong place at the wrong time, a handful of Tommy infantry and a ridiculous number of his own? Buggered if I know. And I realise, after all this time, that I can't remember Anderson's first name. Who's the best goose here? Me or Fritz?

Coming back to camp last night, alone … I can't tell you what that was like. Duncan just let me tell him what happened and then he said it was six of one and half-a-dozen of the other; what could I do? I had a responsibility first to getting the job done. Did I want to say anything else about it? No. Right, well I'd better get those hands seen to. Very attractive they were last night too: looked like I'd had a fight with a length of barbed wire, or tried to kill Fritz with my bare hands. Nothing a bit of iodine won't fix.

Now we're getting ready to head off for a camp outside a town called Albert; there's a big move planned for the village of Pozieres. A proper Australian assault it'll be, apparently. Can't wait to get there. Fritz is terrified, I've heard that's not a joke, and so am I. And I've been keeping to myself all morning. Now Duncan's back, and I'll have to speak to him. I'm not angry any more, I'm just … nothing.

He says: ‘Which was worse? Losing the men or shooting at Germans?'

I say: ‘Toss a coin.'

‘It wouldn't hurt to let it show a bit, you know.'

‘Show what?'

‘That you're upset about it, the men.'

‘I'm not in the habit of that.' Listen to some and you'd think this was stuff all.

‘I'm aware of that. But you're not the only one who's upset about it.'

‘Mmn.' Why don't you go and tell everyone how upset you are then, Dunc. Why don't you stop being so fucking
aloof
with everyone except me. I'm a bit busy right now not making sense of how it is I'm still alive.

‘No one blames
you.
'

He looks like he's about to put a big-brotherly hand on my shoulder. Don't you fucking touch me. And he does. Of course. I lose it, not much, but enough.

‘It's not a good idea to bottle some things. The mill's cleared — why don't you go in there and get it out of your system before we go?'

I do. I go into the empty space that stinks of dust and men and lice dip and endless farting and frustration, put my head against the back wall and let the weep go, quietly.

Stratho comes in and sees me at it; says, ‘You big girlie cunt,' and jumps on me. It's not funny. He says, ‘Mate,' holding onto the back of my collar, ‘it happens. It's going to, isn't it. You think too much, DT. Everyone thinks you're champion, you know, getting in there and evening the score afterwards.'

‘It didn't happen like that.'

‘So?'

No answer.

Stratho says: ‘How're you getting along with Dunc? He put the hard word on you yet? Ten quid says he's in love with you.'

‘Fuck off.' He cracks me.

‘How's that missus of yours? She had the baby yet?'

‘Maybe. Don't know. Probably.' I want to steal one of those frigging bomb-shitting aeroplanes and fly home to her, if you really want to know. And he does know: he's not married but he's got a sweetheart in Sydney, poor girl.

He says: ‘One more reason to push on, ay? Come on.'

Yep.

 

FRANCINE

‘He's very clever with it,' Sarah says, almost dismissively. I opened Daniel's package just before she arrived: another carving. It's a kitten with its paw raised as if it's waving hello: pretty toy. The note says:
The Sphinx says g'day. That's about as interesting as it gets. x Daniel.
He must have sent this from Egypt, and it's taken months to get here. Kitten is very much more than clever and I want to say that to her but all my words are stuck: I'm preoccupied with the conflicting endeavours of trying not to dissolve and trying to convince myself that the arrival of the letter and the package on the exact same day must be a good omen. She adds, as if she's telling Kitten: ‘Pity it's only him who doesn't seem to notice.'

I can agree with her there, but still I can't open my mouth. Beneath that wryness of hers she's unspeakably upset: blink and you'll miss it, there's that look. Perhaps now is not the time to give her the news of his whereabouts.

She returns Kitten to the side table and sits down next to me. Then she takes my hand. That's it for me: immediate blubbering. So much for willing him back with the magical force of my love.

‘Oh Francine,' she says softly. ‘Of course it hurts. Otherwise how would you truly know?'

‘Know what?' Sniff, sniff.

‘That you love. But you can't cry every time it hurts. If I did, that's all I'd do some days.'

That's fairly much all I do seem to have done some days, and she knows that very well, but she's not criticising me.

‘You must think me very hard-hearted,' she says.

Sometimes. ‘No,' I tell her. ‘Just wiser.'

She laughs. ‘I might have more experience but I'm not sure that makes me any wiser. I've learned to not want to know. Not very admirable, but necessary, for me.'

‘Why?' I dare. How can you possibly not want to know?

‘I've lost a son, and a husband, and —' She lets go of my hand.

‘You haven't lost a son,' I say, desperately: please don't talk about him as if he's already dead.

She sighs. ‘He hasn't told you.'

‘Told me what?'

So she tells me. About her first Daniel. I hold my belly, my precious bump, as she speaks plainly about that loss. ‘Just thirteen, so excited to start work, to be a man; then — bang — gone. On the seventh of September 1894.' I knew her pain was greater than mine, but I can't imagine this vastness, and how deep it goes, so deep that my Daniel hasn't ever told me he had this brother. She says, just as plainly: ‘But I was pregnant at the time, very pregnant, and when he was born, I called him Daniel, and I remember promising myself that … I don't know, that I would do a better job with him, love him more, I suppose. That was
all
I thought about, for a very long time. Even when Peter followed his father in, even when the whole mine exploded.'

Peter was a miner too?
And whole mines can explode?

She nods. ‘Especially then. Ninety-six died that day, thirty-first of July, 1902. And they called that an accident too — all the fault of coal gas. Such accidental coal gas that the owners and their politicians could not be held responsible for all their lies about it, or forced to provide safety lamps to avoid another
unfortunate calamity.
And there was the implication, as there is always the implication, that the miners might have taken better care themselves, as if the joke is law:
Every miner is an owner — of his own risk.
We moved here after that.' She pauses again and I'm thinking they didn't mention anything like this in
Bituminous Coal in the Western and Illawarra Fields
or I'd have stayed awake, when she adds: ‘I spent the next six years trying to make Daniel be good at school. I mean understand the point of it.' She raises an eyebrow: ‘And you can see how successful I was there.'

But there's that flash of grief again, so much sharper for this, jabbing at me, and I want to refute the implication she's making against herself and tell her what a stupid, obstinate, abandoning son she has. Abandoning husband I have. I want to hold her, and I want her to hold me. She's got more wisdom to impart, though.

‘Responsibility is a hazardous thing to contemplate. You can call something an accident, an unavoidable thing, you can say
What else could I have done?
and there's no truth to see your loss against anyway. This war is the same. Except there's more dignity, and more public excitement, in dying in battle, than dying at work. It's all the same to the dead, though, isn't it. And for me, it's better to try not to think about it at all.'

She takes my hand again and squeezes. ‘I know you can't help thinking about it, Francine. I know you love my son and I am very glad of it, more than I could ever tell you. Something else experience has taught me is that true life, true love comes from the completeness of your union with your husband. No matter what a fool he is. Mine was just as bad, if not worse. I don't regret a moment of loving him; I still do. That's not something to admire either: it's a privilege, and a burden, of existence.'

Yes. Maybe that's all I need to know too. But I ask her, just to ask one of the thousands of questions I have about her, and how such a woman came to be … here: ‘What made you choose your husband?'

She smiles, slowly, and laughs lightly. ‘Heinrich. Ah. Well, I was sixteen and he, you know, looked just like Daniel, except he was blond and not quite so tall. I thought he must be a god. He was a conscript in the Saxon Guard, and that uniform only made him more of a heart-stopper. He hated it, he was eighteen, and impatient. We eloped — broke enough laws to have him hanged ten times. Very exciting then, to be such young fugitives, heads filled with more romance than sense.'

Good God: how many more questions does that make me want to ask. But, bizarrely, all I can think of in the wash is that this likely means that warrants for criminal rebelliousness remain outstanding on both sides of my baby's family. I try to blab out another question, but only manage: ‘Wh …?'

‘What's the truth?' In her skewed smile she is so delicate and so robust she is sixteen and something more than ancient. ‘You'd laugh if you could really know it. Dresden is a very old city, a beautiful place, but one that can put big ideas into your head only to frown at you for thinking them. Heinrich was thinking about
Sozialismus
, not the revolutionary kind but the natural variety that was supposed to be springing up in the furthest corner of the earth. In Australia, so-called the Workingman's Paradise. He wanted to be something different, new, but he didn't know how to get there. So he shunned his compulsory military training instead, every boy over seventeen had do that training, but Heinrich didn't want to play soldiers in the woods, and so he earned himself a sentence of three years' active service. And if Bismarck didn't kill him, my father would have. Couldn't have my expensive education wasted on cannon fodder, and besides, I was already …' She caresses my bump with a knuckle. ‘He was born in Hamburg, just before we left, and I thought I was the cleverest thing; Heinrich joked that we were Joseph and Mary hiding from King Herod; I joked that I didn't think a good Jewish girl like Mary would have stolen money from her father to do it. When we arrived in Sydney I saw the name Woolloomooloo on a sign and I thought it was the
funniest
thing. Almost as funny as the realisation that Kembla, where we were told to go by the port official since we had no contacts anywhere, had no
natural socialism
, no job for Harry but coalmining, and no house for us other than a sack-walled shack — I cooked on a fire outside with my baby on my back. I cried for the whole first year, I think. Harry didn't. Loved the place at first sight, all of it. Well, he was a natural
bloke
before anything else, so he was always going to love it here. Natural
liebling
, my baby, too: he'd take me out into bush, to try to cheer me up, and he'd say to me:
But look at the sun on the hills, Sarah — look at the colours on the water.
Look.
You can't get that in Deutschland, you can't get that anywhere but here.
'

Suddenly she frowns; I don't remember ever having seen her really frown before.

She says: ‘And Daniel has run back in the opposite direction, a fugitive from himself. It hurts to think of how responsible I might be for that, but it's pointless to wonder about it. You can't tell Daniel what to do; you can't
make
him do anything. You know that already. He is his father's son,
this
land's son, except perhaps in one way: he's not nearly so tough. Couldn't shoot a sick pony. If he comes back from this European disgrace, I don't want to think about what will have been robbed from him.'

That falls like a stone into the room. I can't allow the thoughts of
if he does come back
and
what will be robbed:
Daniel will come home, and when he does, he will stop being Neanderthal Boy.

I ignore the threat and ask her instead: ‘Did you teach him to draw too?'

‘Draw? No. I didn't know he could.'

I get the drawings from my room and show her; she says: ‘It doesn't surprise me. But look at that handwriting — terrible.'

She gets up then and leaves the room for a while. I don't follow her. I think I can guess what she's doing. Meanwhile, I sit and contemplate how complete my union is. I don't care if it's a maternal derangement; I focus on him, and he will come home.

And I keep focusing when the pains start. Unsurprisingly, given my track record, I don't do a good line in stoicism when it comes to labouring in childbirth: I scream for Armageddon. I scream for Daniel. I scream until he comes. And he does come. God knows how he does. It's a boy.

He is born in my bed, our bed, there is blood everywhere, I am shaking all over as I take him in my arms, hold his little lamb cries against my chest till he quietens. He is so very perfect I feel I'm never going to stop shaking and crying. Even Mrs Moran has a tear when she says, ‘Well done,' and cuts the cord. Sarah touches his squashy pink face softly with the back of her fingers and kisses me on the head as she says: ‘Let's clean him up. You too.' She takes him from me, and I really start up again then. No one needs to ask why I'm fairly wailing. Louise is holding me and she keeps a good hold of me till I get myself under control.

Calm again, all clean and soft and bruised and lovely and disbelieving of the miracle and believing that they must surely grow on trees, and here in my arms again. I call him Daniel. Just Daniel. Like his father. He has the hair to prove it. Sarah knew I would.

It's the fifth of July. Sisyphus wants a push across the River Somme and Achilles is most definitely there lending a hand. Little Danny is guzzling contentedly on me — couldn't give two hoots for any of it, least of all my wonder at the simple fact of his feeding — and I close my eyes, the better to feel the magic flow out through me, see it fly across the world to him. And when I open them again, it's snowing outside my window.

Second week of August and there are apples everywhere. Better get to bagging them before they spoil. Must do something after what I've just read: there's an estimate that twenty thousand Australians have been killed in France in the last month.
Twenty thousand?
For once I hope the journalist is lying. If he's not, must be some kind of a record, given the size of the force. That's possibly around a one in four or five chance, just of being killed. How many other casualties? No wonder it's referred to as a cauldron. I'm waiting for my missive from the AIF now, not from Daniel. I don't think magic can fight those sorts of odds.

Little Danny screws up his face at me as if to say, ‘Nah, Mum, it'll be all right.'

Let's believe Baby Daniel is a prophet for the rest of the day, shall we.

More reasonable than putting any stock in reportage: that it'll all be all right because Fritz is copping it worse, because Our Boys, with odds against them, are rather formidable: noble savages. Anger jabs: I'm sure Fritz can cope — he has millions to sacrifice. Bite your tongue, Francine.

I can't really comprehend it. I feel as if I am drifting away from it. This can't be happening.