Love in the Years of Lunacy (9 page)

Martin bristled. ‘It's got to do with Merv Sent, dingbat!'

It was Merv from the Booker T. Club who finally came up with a way to avoid being conscripted into combat while still getting out of working at the factory. On 10 August, Martin would join Merv Sent's 41st Division Entertainment Unit and embark on a national tour of Australian army camps. He'd already passed his medical exam and now had to go through six weeks of basic training at a Victorian base before he could join the concert party.

According to Martin, it wouldn't be all that different from the usual touring circuit that most musicians travelled. ‘The only difference,' he boasted, ‘is that the food's all free and I get paid every fortnight on the dot. No wrangling with nightclub managers.' He sounded almost happy, Pearl thought. But Pearl wasn't happy at all. She and her brother had been inseparable throughout their childhoods—together they had wagged school, contracted illnesses, formed bands. They'd shared beds, clothes, shoes, instruments and even, as kids, swapped identities for an entire day. It was as if Martin was part of her and she of him.

As Pearl gazed at his shorn head she was keenly aware of how much she would miss him. Indeed, she sensed that he was already gone, travelling along bush roads, over distant bridges, vanishing into valleys, away from punch clocks, the factory and the draft—disappearing in a cloud of dust down a highway, away from her.

7

T
he morning that Martin was due to leave, Pearl woke before dawn, feeling nauseous. When the time came, she hugged him goodbye so tightly she could feel his ribcage through his jacket. This would be only the second time they'd been separated in their lives, the first being when Pearl and Clara had toured Ceylon years earlier.

Before he walked down the front steps she gave him one of the superior saxophone reeds James had given her.

‘Thanks, Burly,'
he said, bowing and kissing her on the hand. ‘Every time I play it, I'll think of you.'

She tried to think of some witty comeback, but she was too upset, and instead watched in silence as he shouldered his backpack, stopped at the gate to salute his family, and marched up the street as if he were already a soldier.

Later, still wearing her pyjamas, she retired to the basement with her saxophone to practise. She was already missing Martin. Nora was gone. And so that morning she was experiencing a double dose of loss and she dealt with it the only way she knew how: by blowing it all into her horn.

She hadn't heard from James since their argument at the Con, but their regular weekly lesson in the rose garden was due to take place at ten o'clock that morning. She assumed he would turn up as usual. She felt foolish now for running off the way she had. She just hoped he'd understood.

After forty-five minutes or so of practising scales she began the second exercise in the sequence James had suggested. She would play ‘Cherokee' in every key signature—all twelve of them—and in the coming weeks and months she was supposed to rehearse every song she knew in this way, until her body was so intimate with each nuance of any piece of music that her embouchure and fingers, ears and lungs could interpret it effortlessly.

She heard the doorbell ring but didn't stop playing. Moments later, Aub came clumping down the stairs with a telegram. She ripped it open and read it with a sinking heart. no lesson today. no pass. james.

‘Bad news?' asked Aub.

‘No,' she said, trying to hide her disappointment, wondering with a feeling of dread if James was giving her the brush-off. She needed to see him—that day. To wait another week would be agony.

An hour later she was boarding a train at Central station, carrying her saxophone case. She'd heard of the camp where he was stationed, about fifteen miles out of the city centre in Granville. She knew it was a reckless thing to do—to just turn up at the camp like a lovesick girl—but the missed saxophone lesson gave her an excuse. Hadn't he himself done crazy, wonderful things for the sake of his music? Coffee and Benzedrine for months on end. Hitchhiking to Kansas City and then on to New York. Working as a dishwasher at the Savoy Ballroom for a year just so he could hear Art Tatum play the piano every night.

At Granville station, she asked directions from the ticket collector who pointed down a road towards a cluster of huts that stood in perfect rows, behind which were a baseball pitch and a swimming hole. The passages between the huts were lined with ferns and daisies. A unit of American GIs, shouldering rifles, was being marched around the outskirts of the camp, under the command of a drill sergeant who was shouting orders. She suddenly felt ridiculous, peering through the fence at an army office, wearing her primrose-print dress, holding her saxophone case, planning to invent a flagrant lie just so she could have a brief glimpse of her lover.

A uniformed man popped his head around the doorjamb. ‘You lookin' for someone, lady?' He was wearing spectacles and chewing gum.

She told him she was looking for Private James Washington.

The soldier thought for a moment. ‘You mean Ernest.'

Pearl put down her case. ‘No. James. James Washington.'

The man chomped on his gum. ‘I'm the company clerk, lady. Type up the rosters every week. Ain't got no James Washington on my books.'

She squinted against the morning light, watching the unit marching back towards the camp, and could see them all clearly now, their faces covered in sweat.

She told him that her Washington was in the Quartermaster Corps.

The man looked her up and down. ‘What's a nice dame like you want with a coloured boy?'

She picked up her case. ‘Do you know where I can find him?'

The clerk shrugged and shook his head. ‘We keep 'em over there.' He nodded across the dirt road at a group of tents huddled against a scrubby rise. ‘We call that there the zoo.' She began backing away.

‘Hey,' he called after her. ‘You a charity moll?'

Pearl kicked a stone towards him. He ducked out of the way and it skittered off into a flowerbed. ‘I'm a musician,' she replied testily.

She walked down a path towards the tents. Now that she was so close, she felt anxious and unsure. What if James didn't want to see her? The stubby grass died away and she found herself slogging through a bog of mud indented with thick tyre marks and boot prints. The stench of raw sewage blowing on the westerly wind made her breakfast flip in her stomach. She could see now that the camp was enclosed by a chainlink fence crowned with razor wire, and the sight of it almost defeated her: not only would he be unable to get out; there was no way she'd be able to slip in undetected.

The fence, however, was ringed by bush and, as she circled the settlement she was camouflaged by trees and scrub. Unlike the camp across the road, with its straight avenues of wooden huts roofed with corrugated iron, its rows of daisies, its swimming hole and baseball pitch, its air of middle-class military civility, this camp looked like a shantytown. The company seemed to be housed in a series of large, sagging tents, and when she glanced through the open flap of one she could see there were no cots inside, and no flooring, just rows of bedrolls lying on the ground. And the mess was right out in the open, beneath a canopy of canvas stretched between four gum trees. Two black men were cooking something in a huge steel drum over an open fire. In the distance, on the other side of the camp, she noticed a group of tiny figures bobbing against the ground, performing push-ups. Behind them was what looked like a huge warehouse rising out of a cluster of ironbarks. Leaves and twigs whipped her face as she traced the length of the fence. She saw many black soldiers as she passed—fixing trucks, washing jeeps, cutting trees—but not one of them was James. When the fence veered off at a ninety-degree angle, she continued to follow it.

After about five minutes, she saw the head of a man level with the ground, as if he were buried alive from the neck down, but as she got closer she realised he was standing in a ditch, shovelling dirt, and that there was a second man in the trench with him, also digging. When she was upon them, she hid behind the trunk of an ash gum and, after peering at the two bobbing heads for a few moments, she finally recognised the second man and had to stop herself from throwing down her saxophone case and scaling the fence.

She hadn't planned what she would do in the event that she actually found him, and for a while she just stood there, heart pounding, wondering if she should retrace her steps before he realised she was there. She found it hard to reconcile her proud, dignified James with this man standing in a ditch, sweating profusely and shovelling dirt. It was like seeing a sultan scrubbing a floor, or a prince cleaning a toilet. She couldn't believe the man who'd played with Count Basie and Benny Goodman had been reduced to digging trenches.

He was only about ten yards away from her. She tried to draw his attention by hissing, but he just went on with his work, oblivious. It wasn't until he and his mate took a break for a cigarette that she mustered the courage to whistle the melody of ‘Cherokee'. His head jerked around, trying to find the source. She emerged from behind the tree and pressed herself against the fence, and with a grin he jumped up to join her. His friend, Tyrone, kept watch for the sergeant, while James kissed her through a gap in the wire. ‘Oh, baby,' he murmured. ‘I'm sorry.' And between kisses she stammered her apologies, too, until he hushed her by kissing her deeply again.

‘I've got something to tell you,' he whispered, glancing over his shoulder. ‘I been thinking about what we talked about last week.' He gripped the fence with his fingers. ‘Yesterday, I put in for a request.'

‘A request—what?' She swallowed hard. ‘For a transfer?'

He shook his head. ‘For permission—' he glanced over his shoulder again ‘—for permission to marry.'

‘Who?'

‘
Who
?' he asked. ‘Who do you think? My buddy Tyrone?'

Her pulse was racing as she asked, ‘Are you proposing to me?'

‘We'll have to get my CO's permission first. And wait two months from the day the request was lodged, but . . .' He looked at the ground, suddenly shy. ‘'Course we'll have to deal with your parents. But Tyrone here, he found out there ain't no law in Australia stopping you and me being together. And I got to thinkin', well, maybe this country ain't so bad.'

So many words winged through her mind but she was too overwhelmed to utter a sound. She laced her fingers through his. Their lips found each other and they kissed again through the wire and the taste of him made her feel as if she were levitating and falling at the same time.

When they finally pulled away from one another, he smiled and licked his lips. ‘Your embouchure's improved,' he said, grinning.

Tyrone suddenly called that the sergeant was coming. Pearl pulled away from the fence and fled back into the bushes.

The next week passed in a fast, delirious rapture. She floated through rehearsals, the sets at the Trocadero, her household chores and her daily four-hour music practice. She was dying to tell someone about the proposal, especially Martin, but he was on the road now, heading west across the country.

When Nora Barnes telephoned Pearl at the Trocadero and told her that she was now engaged to Pookie, who was converting his property into a peacock farm, Pearl could no longer contain herself. In a rush she told Nora about her own impending marriage. Nora, far from being shocked that Pearl was to marry a black man, was so happy for them both that she insisted they come up and visit. The four of them could go bushwalking together, and at night they could dine at the Carrington Hotel. Nora would be Pearl's bridesmaid and Pearl would be Nora's. Perhaps they could even have a double wedding, suggested Nora. ‘A double white wedding—with one black groom!' The two of them laughed until the line went dead.

Pearl could hardly wait for her weekly meeting in the rose garden with James, but on the Thursday morning another telegram arrived with exactly the same message as the week before: no lesson today. no pass. james.

‘Looks like your teacher's been misbehaving,' said Aub, glancing over Pearl's shoulder at the message.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Denied passes two weeks in a row. Must've done something really bad.'

Her hand began to tremble as she pocketed the telegram. She knew her father was only teasing but it worried her nonetheless. She hated being denied James, so suddenly, without warning, and wondered whether the same wording in the telegram was a covert invitation for her to seek him out at the camp once more.

This time, she left her saxophone behind, and caught the train out to Granville with a ham sandwich in her handbag. She skirted the camp again, half expecting him to be standing in the same trench as the week before, waiting for her to appear. But when she came upon it, no one was there. The stench, though, was overpowering, and she realised that the camp had no proper sanitation; what James and Tyrone had been digging the week before was a defecation pit. She hurried away and continued to circle the camp. When she caught no sight of him, she sat beneath a blue gum and ate her lunch. Finally, as she was brushing crumbs from her skirt, she saw Tyrone, about twenty yards away, carrying some tools towards the warehouse south of the camp. She picked up a stone and lobbed it over the fence, trying to get his attention. It wasn't until her third attempt, when a rock the size of her fist landed at his feet, that he looked over and saw her.

She had to wait almost another hour before James could get away from the warehouse. As he strode towards her, she could see his eyes were glassy, a deep frown set in his face.

‘God, you look gorgeous,' he murmured, and kissed her through the fence. His hands were covered in grease, but she clutched at them anyway—wanting any part of him that she could have—and asked him what had gone wrong.

He pulled away a little, staring at the ground. ‘CO's got it in for me, baby. It don't look good.'

She tried to remain calm, but felt her queasy insides flipping.

James sighed. ‘CO's denied me permission to marry you.'

‘What?' she gasped. ‘What's he got to do with it?'

‘I told you, everyone has to get permission.'

‘But I thought that was just a formality. Just paperwork.'

James snorted and pressed his forehead against the fence. He looked exhausted, as if he hadn't slept for days. ‘CO has the right to deny permission if he figures a marriage ain't in the soldier's best interests. My CO, he's from Georgia, and he ain't happy 'bout the likes of you and me gettin' married.'

‘But you said it's legal here.'

‘It is, but—'

‘So what's to stop you walking out of camp and us getting married anyway? We don't even need permission from my parents.'

‘Honey, why you think he's had me locked up in here, on extra duties every day, for the last two weeks?'

‘He'll have to let you out on leave sometime.'

‘Here's the kicker, baby,' he said, gripping her fingers. ‘Now I don't want you to get upset. We'll find a way around it.'

‘What?'

A nerve in James's right cheek began to twitch. She could tell he was bracing himself to deliver more bad news. ‘He's having me transferred.'