Even in a factory workers’ lunch shop in an industrial estate, the menu featured shaved this and pulled that. When had sandwich-making succumbed to the language of the barber shop or the wrestling ring? She bit into her smoked turkey and cranberry panini with baby spinach. At least it featured mayonnaise, not a smear of something. The smear was the worst. Perhaps that was when things with Mara fell apart; perhaps it wasn’t the smoking after all. Cate couldn’t help it, her contempt was something she barely concealed, on the basis that she managed to conceal so much else. Mara had been attending workshops at the local deli slash picklery slash culinary emporium slash whatever. The fight they’d had when one evening she had produced a plate of meat so thinly sliced – shaved – beside a smear of something that might as well have been baby shit, it was the same colour and consistency. Pretty much what Cate said, of course. Along with the rest. Like what was the point of having a smear of mustard sauce if that’s what it was, something that looked like a child’s finger painting? Why have sauce if you couldn’t actually load it onto your meat? Like how a smear was the perfect word for a medical test or for something you cleaned off the toilet, but was that what Mara was doing up there at the picklery eatery wankery? Wasting their money, her money, learning to turn decent food into artful displays. Of shit?
That night she’d locked herself in the car in the driveway, wondering why she couldn’t tell Mara how she really felt. Why the nights were so long and the days even longer. Every time she shut her eyes she felt herself falling again out of that helicopter. Saw the white face of the soldier she was nursing.
Now, wiping her mouth – the panini was actually very good – she was struck with a sudden recollection of the look on Mara’s face when she’d said all that. The terrible hurt and confusion, quickly followed by the smouldering hatred. That’s what she always remembered, the hate, not what had come seconds before. What a bitch she had been. She threw her paper bag into the bin and walked back to the training room.
‘The recovery position offers the best way for an unconscious victim to maintain their capacity to breathe.’
Then she asked for a volunteer. A woman from the middle of the room stood up, her name sticker announcing she was Jessica. There wasn’t a great deal of space, but she got Jessica to lie on her left side on the front table so everyone could see. She asked her to bend her legs and tuck her top foot behind her other leg. Then Cate took her right arm and bent it, placing her hand across and over the other arm. Then she held her head.
‘This is the tricky part. Keep the chin well up to ensure the epiglottis is open, but make sure the mouth is turned downward. Remember fluids need to drain from the airway.’
She went and stood behind to run through the main points again. Even brushing her limbs lightly Cate could feel how rigid she was. ‘It’s okay, Jessica, relax. Pretend you’re asleep.’ Jessica laughed self-consciously but closed her eyes anyway.
‘We call this a lateral recumbent position. That just means lying on your side. The arms and legs are locked like this’ – she touched the knee and elbow – ‘to stabilise the victim. The less they’re able to move the more chance of recovery. Another five seconds to study Jessica, then she can get up. We’ve got one last topic to do.’
She always taught CPR last. Everyone did: it was just the way things went in the course, for some reason. When everyone was bored and tired and even the few who had been trying hard and paying attention were thinking about the beers they’d be having as soon as they could get out of here, that for some reason was when she had to cover CPR. While they finished reading through CPR basics, Cate set everything up in the adjacent room. She thought of taking more Endone, but settled for Panadol combined with Nurofen instead, swallowing the pills down before the class trooped in. Sometimes even the effort of leaning over the dummy torso to demonstrate how the hands were placed, one over the other, was too much for her. If she could, she’d place the dummy on a table to minimise the pressure on her lower back. Today there was no table, so she set it out on the floor. She’d have to kneel and then get up carefully.
‘There are five main steps we need to remember for most CPR situations. One: place the hands on the lower half of the breastbone. Two: the depth of compressions is a third of the chest depth of the victim. Three: perform thirty compressions followed by two breaths. Four: if you don’t want to do mouth-to-mouth then keep the compressions up at the rate of one hundred per minute.’ She turned around to face the class. ‘That’s pretty fast, okay?’ They nodded and murmured. As she reached for a chair to help herself up, trying not to pull a face at the jag of pain, someone surprised her by calling out.
‘That was four. You said five main steps.’
‘I did. Thank you.’ They were paying attention after all. ‘Five: if you can’t remember any of that, think of the song “Staying Alive”.’ They all laughed. ‘I’m serious. Perform your compressions to the beat of “Staying Alive” and you’ll have about the right rate.’
It was what she’d done in the helicopter for Trooper Brad Innes. After the explosion she was nursing him all the way back to base in Tarin Kowt and they were at least five minutes from landing when he closed his eyes, all colour in his face draining away faster than she had ever seen. Then it was five long minutes of singing ‘Staying Alive’ in her head while she pumped his chest with her hands, willing his heart to start circulating blood again and deliver oxygen to his brain until they landed.
‘Cate?’ She heard someone cough. Heard her name again. She opened her eyes to find them all staring at her. The room was very quiet. How long had she had her eyes closed?
‘Sorry.’ She reached for her bottle of water, took a swig then checked her phone. Twenty minutes to go.
‘Sorry,’ she said again. ‘Such a long, hot day. You’ve all been great, so we’ll just run through the final checklist for CPR, then you can go back to your desks and fill in those last few questions.’
She reminded them of clearing the airways, checking for obstructions in the mouth, only using one hand if performing on children, the procedures to follow once normal breathing had recommenced, and keeping them in the recovery position until professional medical help arrived.
She told them to return to their desks while she packed away the CPR kit. ‘There are five more questions on your sheets, on the recovery position and CPR. It should only take you a few minutes.’
A man somewhere near the door turned around and called out. ‘Can you just show us that once more? The recovery position?’
She sighed.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just that it’s important. Obviously. I want to get it right.’
She looked at him. One of the singlet wearers. His arms were tattooed from the wrist up. His name sticker had come loose and he smoothed it flat across a prominent pectoral.
‘Salim. Yes, you’re right. It is important.’
Most of them were in the adjacent room, anxious to finish up their test sheets. Just five of them lingered.
‘Of course I’ll show you.’
She would have to get on the floor again. Gingerly, she lay down on her left side next to the CPR dummy. At least the lino was clean and cool. She tucked her foot around her leg and hooked her right hand over the other outstretched arm. She tilted her chin, opened her mouth slightly and shut her eyes. She lay there, just breathing, breathing, imagining her lungs were as soft and clear as Bethany’s. They would be pink, dark pink, like watermelon. Breathing, that was what it was all about, simple, steady breathing.
Cate never knew what happened to Trooper Innes, but she remembered the pink flush that appeared in his face again after it seemed she’d sung ‘Staying Alive’ a hundred times over, compressing his chest. Her wrists ached and his breathing returned. That was just before the helicopter shuddered and tipped them both out. She remembered falling right on her coccyx then blacking out from the pain. Afterwards coming to conscious
ness back in the base hospital, and wishing she hadn’t. Then the pain, the pain. Years of it.
She breathed slowly in and out, in and out. Perhaps she would stay in the recovery position, just stay like this for as long as she could.
Wipe Away Your Tears
It was a dawn landing. But as soon as she wrote the words in her diary she resiled from the phrase. It was far too apt. Forced. But it was dawn, and an especially picturesque one. She glanced out the window again, her stomach registering a dip as the aeroplane dropped another level in its descent. The sky was soft: thick misty bands of grey, dust pink, lavender. Dried lavender, she noted, a different shade to fresh. Beneath it the Sea of Marmara was dove grey, flat and smooth, the ships gliding across it like there was no effort involved, like they were floating towards the narrow straits as naturally as leaves on a pond. She peered closer, pressing her forehead against the tiny window pane. The water was so calm it looked viscous, the ships leaving barely any wake as they headed towards the Black Sea.
She shut her diary. Clearly she was reading far too much into this; she was too receptive, too keen to process all that she was about to experience. Yet she couldn’t help herself, this was the fabled city she had heard so much about but had never once visited. The city of three different names, two mighty religions and their rulers. The city of minarets and great covered markets and hamams and wonderful fresh food – the best tomatoes ever, she had been told – and she was expectant and excited, she couldn’t deny that. Even the names – the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn – were poetic.
Had Harry felt like this, the first time he ever visited Istanbul? She would have asked him but was unwilling to break the silence, could pretend she was arriving on her own. She barely slept on flights, and loved the times when the other passengers were asleep while the cabin lights remained dim and the crew moved in quiet unison in the galley. Discreet acolytes in the mysteries of air travel, they bowed over the few unsleeping passengers, offering fresh coffees or tumblers of spirits. The crew were always young and beautiful. They bore trays draped in white linen. They would bring her a drink, a blanket, the newspapers, and she would feel a sense of cosy privilege, that the flight was hers alone.
They were crossing the tramline towards the Blue Mosque when she noticed the first dog. Dirty light brown, indistinguishable as to breed. Then the next, similar. Indifferent dogs, trotting along with purpose, never approaching either of them, all with yellow tags in their left ears. By the time they had entered the park where the garbage collectors were raising enormous underground bins by chains to be emptied, she noticed there were perhaps six or eight dogs scattered around the square, all walking as if on errands. Two were standing near each other at an intersection, deciding whether to wait for the lights or make a run for it. Later in the day she would see the same dogs, or similar ones – it was impossible to tell – sitting on doorsteps or under café tables, or stretched out asleep on the grassy sections of the square, where tourists had to step over or around them, sometimes pausing to marvel or take photos. But for now, with Harry and Angela almost the only people around in the cool fresh early morning, it was clear that the dogs owned the streets of Istanbul.
She had found them a hotel in Sultanahmet knowing nothing about the area except that it was close to the most romantic of all the places, the mosques, the palaces, the markets and museums that she had read up on. But when they had arrived it was just past seven o’clock and far too early to check in, so they’d left their luggage with the sleepy receptionist and walked the streets.
After three days in the city, where they walked everywhere, she realised that although the dogs were clearly wild and ownerless they did not appear savage, arousing none of the vague primal fear she always felt when encountering any dogs, in particular large ones. Unleashed dogs, in the park nearby her home, were a source of apprehension: no matter how benign they were, how jolly and unselfconscious their names as their owners frolicked with them – Tickles, come here, Tickles! Good girl, Pom Pom! – she always shrank from them as much as possible, head down, shoulders hunched, as if they were hoodie-wearing youths and she the only other person in the park.
The coach down the peninsula took most of the day. Not that it was so far in distance, but the traffic was extraordinary. How was it possible that there were so many cars? Angela had never seen traffic like it. The route that took them from the depot followed Kennedy Caddesi, the same avenue that had brought them from the airport so quickly that cool morning just a few days before. Now it was blocked as far as they could see, and roads beside it filled with vehicles that seemed neither to sit still altogether nor to move but merely edged forward, as if teasing all the passengers inside. It took more than two hours before their coach was free of the southern suburbs of the city, but even on the freeway south they went slowly. The only thing slower was the occasional horse and cart they passed, at which they both laughed with rare, uncomplicated pleasure. They stopped for late lunch at a restaurant beside the water, a sprawling service centre with little service but, as everywhere, excellent food.
‘And two Efes?’ Harry said, holding up two fingers after he ordered his stuffed eggplant. But, no, like so many places it sold no liquor so Angela chose a pomegranate juice and they took their plates out to a table overlooking the water. The Dardanelles was like a huge canal, the water flat and dull, and the shore, as far as they could see, a bleak industrial yellow-brown, with barely a tree or anything green in sight.
It was a dawn landing. And that was just about all she knew. Apart from, of course, what everyone knew: the obscene numbers of men slaughtered and the ignominy of retreat eight months later. Now, as she stood on the thin strip of beach, she tried to picture it, without success. There, for instance, was the ridge these men and boys had been ordered to scale as gunfire rained down. It was almost vertical to her eyes. How had soldiers burdened with packs and bearing guns run up these ridges?
And, more importantly, why? Why had they run straight into the embrace of the enemy? It was impossible to imagine following orders of such blind stupidity. Water, sand, hills and then those bare perpendicular ridges with the enemy perched on the cliffs above: surely there had never been a more extreme collision of geography and men. Behind her was the calm Aegean Sea, where on ships young women with fear in their throats had listened to the thunderous noise of attack and watched the skies explode as they waited and waited for their first patients. And when they finally came, so long after they were first attacked, the screaming, the blood, the spectacular injuries that delivered endless possibilities of what a human body could endure. None of that could be imagined either.
Harry was walking towards her, holding out a fragment of pottery or something.
‘Mark said you might still pick things up around here.’ He had been halfway up one of the many paths leading over the first ridge before disappearing into the scrub with his map. The hotel proprietor – a war history buff who’d settled in Eceabat over twenty years ago – had told them that the place was very different to how it had been only a few years ago. More scrubby, less exposed. Now it was a lot harder to get around than it had been, though if you were lucky you could still find stuff. The hotel was decorated – if that was the right word – with all sorts of stuff: shell casings and broken demijohns, tin plates and brass buckles, glass marbles, knives, coins and little tin boxes blooming with rust. Stuff. Mark made it sound like a particular category of something.
Harry shook his map out and set off again. Angela did not want to find stuff. She could not even leave this little rubbly beach. They had walked along the main path and just past the cemetery, where everyone was looking for the mythical Simpson and his mythical donkey, had agreed that he would make his forays into the scrub and up the ridges, and she would continue along the beachfront. To be honest she had not wanted to tell him that she’d prefer to leave altogether, because they had only just arrived and were booked in for three days. But
the sadness of the place engulfed her. She had been unprepared for this and was surprised to find herself so close to tears. It was as if the deaths of all those men in that senseless manner rose in a miasma from the ground to choke her. If she did not continue traipsing along the beach or the main path then she would only be able to sit down and weep. Around every turn of every path, down gullies, on the sides of hills, on the top of the most famous hill of all, where a solitary pine still stood – descendant, presumably, of the original – were cemeteries. The entire peninsula was a cemetery. And the thousands of graves were, she had learned, only for a fraction of those killed, the ones whose bodies had not disappeared altogether into the sodden earth, or been pulverised by mortar fire or wounded beyond recognition.
Harry could pay his tributes to his great-grandfather, find his grave: she would keep walking then find a shady place to sit on the beach and gaze out towards Lemnos and wait. It was far hotter than she had expected and she felt incapable of walking for hours up hills through the scrub. And there were flies, dust. It was windy. Whatever. She would stay down by the water and wait for him. She was also finding the tourists unbearable. They spoke too loudly, they laughed, they joked about finding souvenirs, they played awful music on their iPhones, and if they addressed her and found she was Australian too – well, who wasn’t, here? – it was all she could do not to tell them to shut up and show some respect. She did not regard herself as a tourist. She was not making a pilgrimage or paying tribute. They were travelling, true, but she had not even wanted to come here and Harry said it was only the second, and would be the last, time in his life. The first had been when he was a hippie backpacker, only making the trek down the peninsula, away from the delights of the Pudding Shop and freely available hash, to oblige his mates.
At the memorial beside Ari Burnu cemetery she stopped behind a group of tourists and a guide who had just alighted from a small bus. She read the words slowly, repeating them to herself under her breath. You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well. The guidebook to Anzac Cove that Harry had brought had a paragraph on this memorial. It was from a letter written by Turkey’s leader to console the people of the country he had so bitterly fought some decades before. The empathy of this, the generosity of spirit, the desire for reconciliation, not to mention the regard for the women in this whole bloody story that was always about men – all of this struck Angela as being far more manly and heroic than any deeds he or his men might have performed on the field, and again she felt the sting of tears.
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