Siddon Rock (14 page)

Bert Truro took a can of petrol from the back of his ute and started splashing it on the walls of the hut.
Goin' to get rid of the flea-ridden dump once and f'all.
Suddenly there was no-one standing with him as the others slunk off towards the town, and stumbled away home.

Bert emptied the rest of the can at the doorway and was feeling through his pockets for a match when a chorus of howls startled him. Nell strode towards him, her dingoes at heel, her anger as sharp and crackling as the flames Bert was about to light. If Bert would tell the truth, which he was indisposed to do at any time, he would say that at first he thought this woman was a stranger, for she was surely not the Nell he saw working in the kitchen at the hospital. That Nell was a small, soft woman who looked at no-one as she went about her tasks. This woman striding through the night surrounded by wild dogs was tall and powerful, with one dangerous-looking hand stretched towards him. The sight was too
much for his beery mind, and he fled to the safety of his ute and then back to town, never to speak to anyone of the incident.

As Macha entered the Yackoo, back at the Two Mile Brigid had returned from the railway station. She emptied the kit-bag onto the verandah, reeling back at the odour that emanated from it – a smell, as Granna said,
like something died and then died again … and not happy with that, died a third time
. The stink took days to dissipate, and people in the town asked about the exotic and repulsive smell that wafted in from the Two Mile. Some went to the Roads Board Office to complain, but Gawain Evans said that he had no idea what the smell was and denied any knowledge of its source. But then he had never been out of the town in his life, let alone overseas.

In the bottom of the bag, covered with dirt that had a foreign texture and colour, was a worn leather case holding a camera, the likes of which had not been seen in Siddon Rock. Brigid took the camera from its case and wiped it over and over with a cloth dampened with kerosene, removing layers of a black glue-like substance which, she told Granna after hours of working over it,
is like nothin' in God's kingdom and worse than the devil to get off.
When the camera was clean they could see that it was dented and scratched and altogether gave the appearance of being well used. On the bottom of the camera was a name they did not know – Leica.

The camera-case itself Granna cleaned with saddle-soap. As the grime was removed, writing was revealed engraved in the leather, but they could make neither head nor tail of the inscription:
Meinem Sohn Hansi. Halte dein Leben fest, in Liebe, Mütterchen
.

Brigid took the used film from the camera and another that was inside the case.
I'll get these developed for her
, she said.
I'll take them to Albey at the chemist's when I'm in town tomorrow.

When Brigid collected the developed film later in the week, Albey was apologetic:
Not sure how these will be, Brig
, he said.
It's a damned interesting type of film, though. I've seen nothing like it before. You've got to hand it to those Germans, they certainly know what they're doing when it comes to this sort of thing.

Macha was in her usual place on the verandah when Brigid called to her,
Come and look, Macha, I've got your photos here
. When Brigid looked around Macha had disappeared, and she heard her bedroom door close behind her.

Brigid opened the envelope that held prints from the roll of film in the camera case. They were all of young men in the uniform of the German army.
So young
, she said, looking at their playful poses.
Just boys, really.

The photos from the roll of film that had been in the camera were altogether a different matter. Granna picked them up and ran her thumb down the edge of the pile, making them flick into motion. She went silent, and flicked again. Then again.
Oh no
, she said.
Oh no.
She
started towards the kitchen fireplace, but Brigid grasped her arm.

What is it? You can't burn them. They're Macha's. Let me see.

You shouldn't
, Granna said.
Brig, you really shouldn't.

But Brigid Connor took the pile of photos and mimicked Granna's flicking motion, so that the images ran into movement. She did it again, then looked at Granna.
What does this mean?

The first flickering images showed women with arms around their children – no men were there – standing in a row against the wall of a wooden church. Soldiers stood with guns trained on the group, and a photographer was at one side recording the scene. A German officer walked up and down in front of the women. The words shouted were in the aggressive thrust of his head.
Where are they; tell me now.
But no-one spoke; no-one moved. The man pulled a child from the row and pushed her onto her knees in the dust, his pistol at her head.
Where are they; tell me now.
Then the child was lying in the dirt, her head in a dark stain on the ground.

Brigid dropped the photos onto the table.
Who took these? Granna, where was our Macha? How did she get these?

Granna picked up the photos again, and Brigid looked over her shoulder. Now the church was burning fiercely, and the street was empty except for the dead child and the soldiers lying back resting, and one who stood with a machine-gun trained on the door of the church.

Who could watch such horror
, Brigid said.
Who could stand there and take such photos.
Then things changed.

Something had made the photographer walk away from the village. An unusual sound from the forest, maybe? Now the scene was of trees, and there, up a large tree close to the photographer, was a shadowy shape pale against the blackness of the forest.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear that's Macha
, Brigid said.
But it's a bloke. Infantry by the look of it. Definitely an Australian uniform. But Mach was a nurse, so it can't be her.

Granna's hands shook as she went to the window where the light was brighter. As she held the photographs up, the better to see them, they twisted and the angle of vision altered. Now the women saw, as if high above a tableau, the photographer walking away from the village into the edge of the forest, and aiming the camera all around him. They saw him drop the camera and raise his arms in the classical gesture of surrender; and then he was on the ground with the Australian standing over him.

Granna scooped up the photos and threw them into the kitchen fire.

But that was Macha, wasn't it. How ever did she get there? And in the infantry? And she would have seen …
Brigid broke off, hardly able to speak, and for a moment she touched her daughter's mind.
She would have seen that horror. Oh God. The horror.

Brigid and Granna heard the bang of the cupboard
on the verandah where the bedrolls were kept, the
click-thunk
of a rifle bolt being checked, and then the thud of Macha's boots as she walked across the hard earth of the house-yard. Brigid started to move towards the door but Granna put a hand on her arm.
Best let her be, Brig. She'll go to the Yackoo. It's a safe place for her.

We should've thrown out that bloody Hun camera and the bloody film
, Brigid said.
Mind our own friggin' business, is what we should've done. Now she won't come home for who knows how long.

And this is indeed what happened. Macha went back to her shelter at the centre of the Yackoo, where she lit a small fire in a circle of stones and kept it alight with twigs and broken-up pieces of dead wood. There she sat with the rifle and the camera by her side in the twitching, sighing bush until night. Then she wrapped the camera in a blanket from the bedroll and put it under a pile of leaves in the corner of the shelter, checked her rifle, and marched out of the bush towards the town of Siddon Rock.

Macha's change from army nurse to infantryman came about as things often do: with no fuss or bother, no grand plots or plans, but as the result of propitious circumstance.

It was by chance that Macha was the only specialist nurse available on the night Corporal Mark Connor was admitted to the isolation tent. When Mark was occasionally conscious during the long days and longer nights, they talked about their name similarity, and of how their long,
thin bodies, red hair and freckled, pale complexions must surely be a trait of the Connor clan from way back.
I always wanted the other Irish look
, Macha said.
You know, the black hair and blue eyes.

Ah, me too
, Mark said through his pain.
But my mother told me I was of the line of Cuchulain and had to put up with his colouring if I wanted his courage.

Mine too
, said Macha, as she re-dressed his wounds yet again.
Mine too.

As the days passed, Mark faded and Macha could see the layers of his body. At first there was a translucence of the skin which slid away from the freckles burned deep into his face and hands by the hot sun of his childhood. Flesh became mist and drifted off, leaving a broken skeleton and damaged internal organs lying in bas-relief against the rough field-hospital bedding, until they too became as misty and inexact as a photogram image.

Mark disappeared completely at three o'clock one morning – the hour of the wolf when the spirit is at its lowest ebb. It seemed to Macha entirely natural to put on his uniform, pick up his pack and rifle and walk out into the landscape of war.

That Mark and Macha were no longer at the hospital went generally unremarked. Some probably assumed that he had recovered enough to be transferred and that Macha had gone with him as escort. Two nurses, rushing from the barracks tent to the general ward, said they saw him walk out towards the front, so maybe he had recovered and gone back to his unit. In the turmoil and crises of war,
the departure of the living or the dead was not a thing to be commented on.

For Macha to be Mark Connor was easy. She was tall and thin, and the years of physical work on the farm had made her strong and wiry. Her skill with the rifle silenced any who may have questioned her.

We know that Macha was on Crete, her documents showed this. The rest can only be conjecture – a story constructed from the way Macha behaved when she came back to her own town.

Crete for Macha would have been fairytale country, with its pine trees, green valleys and snow-capped mountains. A place from the books of myths and stories that Brigid had read to her when she was small.

One day, slow-moving German planes flew over the island, dropping paratroopers into the dreaming landscape. Down they floated like confetti in the bright sunlight, into the battle for Crete.

Maybe it was Macha's need for solitude that had made her climb a tree at the edge of a small inland village. Had her troop stopped here, and left her behind when they moved on? Rules never did concern Macha much, and she could well have walked away. Whatever the reason, there she was high up a tall pine, with an eagle's-eye view of the German soldiers entering the village. She watched the photographer snapping here, there and everywhere as women and children were pulled from their homes. She heard the commander
shouting at the people as they lined up against the timber wall of their church. She heard a child whimper and saw a woman clasp her hand over the child's mouth. Too late, the man had a scapegoat: he pulled the child from her mother and pushed her onto her knees. He wanted information. The townspeople did not want to give it. No-one moved.