The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  The Zanardi house was marginally less affected so they helped Nina and Marisa and Donatella clean that up first. Nonna Isabella was sitting silently in the only unbroken chair, her hands on the shoulders of Paola and Leo, who sat stone faced at her feet. Joe and Harry set to with the others until Gigi told them he was more worried about the Gestapo coming back than he was about cleaning up. They took his point and reluctantly went back to their burrows above the vineyard.

  * * *

  Joe lay beside Charlie’s empty slats in the main cave and tried to piece it all together, how everything had become so personal and vicious. Harry was further along in a separate burrow but all his clothes were hanging here like ghostly mementos of their past three years: Don Claudio’s cassock, One-Eyed Jack’s cap with the red star, the Wehrmacht tunic, his collection of boots, and now the black kepi and full uniform of the Republican lieutenant.

  Building the cave and the burrows had been Joe’s idea. When Luca and Harry had first put their heads together it was fairly obvious, even to warriors like them, that they didn’t have the numbers or the firepower for direct confrontations, so the Garibaldis set out to harry and hamper the local Nazi war machine. Gemona was an important junction for men and materiel coming down through Austria: it made sense to blow up railway lines, points, trains and bridges. Their first attempt had been an ambitious attack on the same Orvenco bridge. Back then there was no one guarding it, but even so it had been a disaster.

  Joe’s assumption that everyone around him knew more than he did had cost them dearly. He’d said nothing as the homemade dynamite sticks were taped to the underside of the rails. When the fuse ignited the basting cap and the dynamite blew, there was much noise and fury and the rails themselves were twisted, but the bridge remained in place, as a squad of stormtroopers proved by running back across towards them. As the partisans tried to melt into the darkness along the river track, the man who’d set the charges was carrying an extra stick he’d thought was superfluous. As he was sliding down some shingle the stick exploded and he and the man behind him were blown to smithereens.

  Back at the Bonazzon kitchen, the gloom had been pervasive. They’d lost their first men in action to their own blundering. Angelo and Toni had wives and children. Joe told Luca that if he’d seen Angelo put the stick in his jacket pocket he would have said something. In the mine at Ngapara, Captain Nimmo had insisted that the sticks were never taken out of their wooden boxes until they were at the blasting site, and great care was always taken in placing and packing the sticks in the holes they’d drilled, because dynamite was sensitive to movement and shock, and if it was old it wept and degraded and was even more dangerous. By this time, Luca was looking at him with great interest and Joe feared he’d been insensitive.

  He tried to backtrack. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘the formula you use here is different, but . . .’

  ‘What formula did you use?’ asked Luca.

  ‘Three parts nitroglycerine, one part sawdust,’ said Joe, ‘and we mixed in a bit of sodium carbonate.’

  ‘We can get nitroglycerine and sawdust,’ said Luca. ‘Where would we find sodium carbonate?’

  ‘Senti,’ said Joe when he saw where this was going. Listen.

  Luca cut him off. ‘Tell us what you want and we’ll get it for you.’

  Now that Joe had time to think about it, that’s where Charlie’s end had begun, in a local leather factory that used the chemical they wanted. They’d broken in easily enough and Charlie had pointed out, once they’d loaded the truck with the chemical, that there was all this empty space on the tray and all these cured skins inside the factory. They’d filled the truck with pelts and taken off. Charlie had found a buyer for the pelts in town, flogged them off and brought the money home.

  What Charlie did with the pelts was a forerunner of what he did with nitroglycerine. The Garibaldis had found an old fellow who had connections to a tunnelling contractor and could get them nitro. He’d wanted payment, but the Garibaldis had no money. Charlie said that wasn’t a problem. He talked to the old man and persuaded him to take tobacco as payment. It was like gold — he could make a lot of money.

  ‘But we have no tobacco,’ Luca pointed out.

  Charlie said there were tobacconists all over town who would like to help the cause. Luca had his doubts but Charlie was right, in a sense. He and Luca simply walked into a tobacconist and handed over a scribbled IOU from ‘Il Governo Democratico dello Stato Futuro d’Italia’, and took what they wanted. In the retelling, Charlie made it sound easy, though he admitted they’d produced their guns as the tobacconist looked up in surprise after reading the note.

  Spain and Russia had made Luca a hard bastard. Early on he’d shot and killed a known fascist in his home in front of his wife. The message to the Chi lo sa’s was obvious, Stai zitto. Keep it zipped. The Gestapo were no longer the only bully boys in town. And the tobacconists had heard the bush telegraph and said nothing.

  Joe knew that dynamite had to be dry and not allowed to freeze, so the first thing he asked for was safe storage. His every instinct said cave, and Bepi, Gigi, Luca, Harry and Charlie spent several days at his direction extending a natural buca at the end of the property where it rose to the hills. The good soil excavated was barrowed to the maize fields, and the stones and clay to the vineyards. Rocks were kept to cover the floor, then they brought lengths of flat timber to lay on the rocks so there was air between the ground and the boards. Anything stored there was off the earth and dry. They built a wooden trapdoor for the entrance and covered it with one of several heaps of rotting vine prunings that were scattered across the hillside.

  Joe carefully stored the nitro and blasting caps and fuses and chemicals, then constructed a low bench out of rocks and boards that he could kneel in front of. He used a couple of old bowls from Nina’s kitchen for soaking the nitro and sodium carbonate into the sawdust, before he wrapped the dry mixture in white baking parchment from which the pitch and tar had been removed. He tried to keep the dimensions of the cylinders to roughly the same size as the ones they’d used in the mine at Ngapara — about eight inches long, an inch and a bit in diameter and weighing about half a pound. He reckoned if he used the same formula in sticks of roughly the same size, he might be able to work out how many he’d need for any given job.

  They’d used the concrete electricity pylons as practice. Joe remembered how they’d looked for the natural flaws and fissures in the coal seam to drill the holes, into which they’d pack the dynamite. They couldn’t drill the concrete of a pylon, but Joe felt the small indentation running down the back, a join in the mould the makers had poured the concrete into. Trial and error was possible in the early days because the pylons weren’t guarded, but Joe had got it about right from the start: the first pylon was blown out of the earth.

  Joe had gradually refined the power he needed so he didn’t waste precious explosive. They’d blown up so many pylons that the Nazis began to replace them with timber, and these the Garibaldis had attacked with saws. Once Joe got the timing right, they’d knocked out railway lines, points, signals and two locomotives on the railway.

  Joe’s cave set a precedent for the other partisans, who needed places of their own to store arms, ammunition and, occasionally, themselves. The Garibaldis all developed a cave or a sump, the location of which no one outside the immediate family knew.

  As Gianni Lamonza, the name he’d been given by Donatella, Joe came to be held in higher regard than he’d ever been as Joe Lamont. There was huge satisfaction in being part of a team. For the first twelve months, until Major Ferguson parachuted in, they were masters of their own destiny. Much of what they did depended on Donatella’s intelligence. She would cycle past the potential targets and give very precise descriptions to her brother of the German presence and avenues of approach and escape. Luca decided what targets when, Joe decided what they needed to do the job, and Charlie would go out and get whatever t
hey needed. On the night, Harry’s job was to get Joe and his box of dynamite to the target and back out again, and the partisans under Luca provided cover and diversions.

  Harry had worked out hand signals he and Joe could use in close proximity as they crept or crawled forward. One black night, Joe had missed the flat hand that said, Stop. Lie low. Harry’s hand, strong, dry, found Joe’s in the darkness and pressed it flat against the earth. Joe had lowered the box of dynamite and lain silent on the ground for what seemed like minutes. He could hear nothing but his own careful breathing, until a German patrol crept right past their noses. Harry’s hand bunched Joe’s into a fist and they crawled forward again. In the blackest of nights Joe stopped even trying to look, just followed that strong, dry hand clasping and releasing his, like flashes of torchlight through the darkness ahead.

  By night, they all hung together on a thread of absolute trust. By day, Joe watched everything gradually fall apart.

  Treviso 2014

  42

  She was woken at 4.06 a.m. by her iPhone burping. She took a moment to realise where she was, quickly checked on her father, then opened the text. Im so srry babe. Cn u evr 4give me? S.

  Auckland was three hours behind, tomorrow, so 4.06 here would make it just after one o’clock in the afternoon there. Sarah would have finished her Zombie session and maybe she’d had a glass of wine and seen her own reflection in the bottom of the glass. Srry? This was a woman of thirty-one who, like Clare, had completed an LLB. Cn u evr 4give me? Clare felt like texting back: 4get abt fcking my hsbnd, btch. i hate U 4 ur txt-spk. Or ringing her up and screaming down the phone: Say something real to me, girlfriend! Tell me why you did it? Did you slip in the lotus position and accidentally impale yourself on Pedro? Was ripping me off in your fucking stars?

  Sarah believed in astrology. She had plotted her stars and moons down to the minute of her birth and maybe believed that the only reason she fucked her best friend’s husband was because Scorpio was in its fourth moon. How could anyone with half a brain believe in that shit when the reality of stars and black holes and the universe was so much more interesting?

  Though, she corrected herself, if Renzo, Mr Infinity, was to be believed there were many realities. And who was she to doubt a man with a doctorate in physics, even if he was probably dumbing the whole thing down for her benefit? Some of the things he’d talked about last night in that bar beside the spring-fed waters of the Sile kept coming back to her: the limits of human imagination; that the sub-atomic world was stranger than anyone could imagine; and that anything that is possible, no matter how unlikely, will happen all the time.

  Where did that leave the improbability of astrology? Maybe there was something in it. And since it was entirely possible, not even unlikely, that people fucked their best friends’ spouses, maybe Clare could one day find it in her heart to forgive Sarah. But first she’d have to grow up and apologise in a language that was recognisably adult.

  What did Sarah think would follow from forgiveness — that their friendship would continue as before? To truly forgive did you have to also forget? Clare didn’t think she could ever forget. Particles might by nature misbehave while no one was looking — maybe that was the human condition in microcosm — but when they misbehaved were the particles still recognisably themselves? She must ask Renzo. But forgiveness was beside the point: Clare would never again be able to look into Sarah’s lovely brown eyes and see the person she used to know, the person she thought she knew. Clare could only just imagine a day when the cheating and the fraud might be forgotten, but not the betrayal of character that had allowed Sarah to do those things. That was fatal. That was what made it unutterably sad. She’d lost her best friend forever.

  Nicholas had at least tried to apologise face to face. He’d surprised her as she watched him walk up the path to her father’s house. He’d lost so much weight. She could recognise what she’d once seen in him, that exotic olive-skinned hirsuteness that also described Renzo: the opposite of her own colouring, the sensual contrast of her skin on theirs.

  He’d tried to kiss her in the European way on the porch when she’d opened the door — at least she’d assumed that’s what he was planning — but she’d stepped back and waved him through the door.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I understand. Where’s your father?’

  ‘Out.’ He’d advised her against seeing Nicholas and had made sure he wasn’t there when he came.

  ‘I always got him,’ said Nicholas.

  He meant liked. My father never got you, she felt like saying. He warned me against you.

  Nicholas had been in conciliatory mode, and she’d been grateful for that. She’d offered him coffee; he’d asked for tea, herbal. So unlike him. She hadn’t wanted him to get settled in the sitting room so she’d placed the cup on the breakfast bar in the kitchen and stood in front of him, implicitly challenging him to get on with it and say what he’d come to say.

  ‘I wanted to say I’m sorry for what I did, so sorry. I wanted to tell you that to your face.’

  ‘Is that it?’ she’d asked him. She didn’t mean to be rude, but she couldn’t believe the man she knew had come here with that solitary card to play. He’d looked disappointed. The spaniel eyes had pleaded with her. They’d always done the trick in the past.

  ‘I understand,’ he’d said again. ‘You’re entitled to feel the way you do. I behaved like a total dick.’

  ‘That doesn’t begin to describe what you did—’

  ‘I know, I know. I don’t expect you to forgive me but I want you to understand something. It wasn’t the real me that did that stuff, babe.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, of course it was me, but it was the addicted me, the coke-head me. The money I stole from the business I didn’t spend on stuff for myself, it went to feed my addiction.’

  She’d felt like asking him for the name and address of this third party, Adam Addiction, so she could sue him for the money she’d lost.

  ‘The business was us,’ she’d said. ‘You stole from me.’

  ‘I want to you to know that I’ve gotten help, that I’m clean.’

  ‘I’m pleased for you.’ She couldn’t understand why he was telling her this. ‘I thought maybe once you knew, you might find it in your heart to forgive me. It’s not as if I profited personally from the fraud.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the sense that I was stashing it away,’ he’d added quickly. ‘It went straight up my nose.’ He’d held his palms up like a supplicant. ‘I’ve got nothing.’

  She’d watched his seminar, recognised the tells: eyes engaged, palms open. See, nothing to hide. This was a sell. Nicholas was closing. She knew what he was doing, yet still felt the pull.

  ‘You’ll have half the house. That’s more than you deserve, but I’m not fighting it.’

  Nicholas had put nothing into the matrimonial home. Clare had ploughed in everything she had: her savings and the proceeds of her one-bedroom apartment — half a million. And they’d borrowed another half million. They’d planned to do the house up and either flick it or keep it, depending on babies, but nothing had happened — Nicholas had always been too busy to even discuss it, and the business was too fragile to risk borrowing any more. And she hadn’t been able to get pregnant; she’d thought maybe it was all those years on the pill. So now, four years on, the house was valued at 1.5 million and they might get more, and Nicholas, having put in nothing, neither dollars nor effort, was going to walk away with half the equity, $500,000, while she would get exactly what she’d put in less inflation. In what kind of perverted legal perspective was that fair? And as the marriage fell about her — the very day before her father had tried to console her by saying, ‘At least there’s no child, Clarebelle’ — she found out she was pregnant.

  ‘Okay. But does it need to come to that is what I’m saying?’

  That had been
a shock. She’d believed he’d take the money and run. Maybe he’d thought it was good business to stay. Her father wouldn’t last long, and she was the sole beneficiary. Maybe he’d thought if they stayed together for a while, he’d get a half share of that too. Had she imagined those eyes appraising the rooms as she’d ushered him in? Making a quick valuation of what he could gain by putting in another couple of years’ hard yakka with her?

  He’d held his hand out to her and said, ‘Babe’, with those pleading eyes. ‘We were so good together. Come here. Come to me. Give me a hug.’

  That’s what forgiveness meant, she’d realised: a sympathy fuck for starters. Say hello to Pedro. He looked pathetic. Contemptible. The cocaine admission simply confirmed his weakness. She’d thought she’d have so much to say to him, she’d rehearsed so many lines. But when he was finally sitting there right in front of her, easy meat, none of it seemed worth saying. ‘I’m not buying,’ she’d said.

  ‘Babe!’ He’d managed to look mortified. ‘As if!’

  She’d known what she had to do. ‘Go. Get out.’

  Once he’d known his play hadn’t worked, he’d become petulant, then angry. ‘I thought you’d be grateful!’ he’d shouted as she’d slammed the front door in his face.

  43

  In those few moments, standing white-faced inside the door, listening to his steps down the path, making sure he’d gone, she realised that the baby would mean Nicholas would be in her life forever. She’d have to see him regularly, consult with him over life choices for another vulnerable human being, give credence to his opinions as if she had respect for them, watch him attempt to inculcate his values as if she didn’t have complete contempt for them.

  Since then he’d gone on the offensive. The bastard had used the shiny-panted suburban sole practitioners for his contract flipping, Oh yes, but when it came to his own matrimonial property he’d gone straight for the jugular: Sheila McLintock QC, a big-haired blonde who’d made her name getting huge settlements for wives betrayed by rich husbands, and was now the go-to legal pundit on television. We note we have not received a reply to our last e-mail. We look forward to your response by return.