by David Vernon
Kimiko bowed. The Yellow Peril. She whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
He kissed her forehead, tipping his palm into hers, cupping her hands warm in his.
And then he was gone.
• • •
The hot breath of the build-up swallowed all, night and day. Sweat covering you as soon as you rose from the bath. The thought of allowing another’s flesh to break the water’s beads, to press against you: almost unbearable.
Except when it was Davidson.
Don’t you dare touch her!
Kimiko screwed her eyes shut. She rolled, her sheets twisted around her like a snare. The heat wrapped her up fever-like, stuck the mattress to her side.
She opened her eyes. The yellow pearl glowed from the table-top.
Thunder rumbled outside: an empty promise.
Kimiko sat up.
She grabbed the pearl.
She ran for the docks.
This late, only a few drunken sailors lay cocooned with their bottles in the gloom. The wet slap of waves lip-smacked the pylons beneath. At the end of the wharf, Kimiko padded up the Diane’s gangway.
The cabin door was locked. She pressed her ear against it.
“I told you.” Davidson, tired, but firm. “She’s not under suspicion of any kind.”
“Then why do you know her name?” Jiro. His voice a razor.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
The sound of fist hitting flesh. Kimiko flinched.
“Leave him, Jiro. We’ll row him out to the creek. Another drunk drowned in the Harbour: no one will even blink.”
“No.” His voice so determined. “This is my imo-uto at stake. I must know.”
“He’s Special Branch, Jiro-san.” Toku slipped into a Japanese whisper. “He will be missed. If you won’t let us kill him cleanly, you have to let him go. Which will it be?”
Kimiko strained to hear. The waves lapped.
Boots strode up the cabin’s stairs. Kimiko jumped back. The door handle jerked, held.
Kimiko lowered herself over the edge of the hull just as the key scraped and the door opened. Three shadows slipped past, onto the dock, murmuring in debate.
Hanging, she looked down at the milky waters of the bay. Imagined the crocs and sharks beneath the surface. With a shiver, she hauled herself onto the deck.
But the door was still locked.
Damn.
Slowly, she looked back at the water.
Slowly, she lowered herself in.
Even in the hot season, the water felt cold. Her petticoats swelled up like jellyfish. Edging forward, she reached a porthole. The ship was empty, sitting high in the water: the porthole left open a crack. She wedged her fingers inside and forced it open. She wriggled through and landed like a fish on the cabin floor.
“Kimiko!” Davidson twisted in his chair.
“Sh!”
He fell silent. His gaze shadowed her as she toured the cabin, collecting a bowl, a knife, a rag.
“You didn’t tell him. About us.” She squeezed her skirts into the bowl. Glanced at him.
His breath strained against the ropes. “I didn’t want to get you into trouble.”
She stepped closer.
His eyes followed.
“More trouble, you mean.” She touched the wet rag to a cut above his eye. He winced.
“You’re not in trouble with us,” he went on. “I went to the House for surveillance, yes. There are people of interest there. But you … you were … are, different.”
She squeezed the rag into the bowl. “We’re not at war.”
“Australia and Japan? No. Not yet. But you know it’s coming.”
Her rag paused on his cheek. “And what then?”
His gaze faltered.
Her gaze hardened. Deportation. To Nagasaki, a homeland as familiar as Mars to her.
“I should’ve let them kill you.” Her voice shook, but she refused to cry again tonight.
“It won’t change anything.” His voice just above a whisper. “The war will still come. Others will find you. And I’ll … ” He looked up at her, his eyes bright in the moonlight. His voice quiet but firm. “I’ll still love you.”
She held his gaze a second longer.
She cut him free.
But he didn’t run. He sat, his hand held out to her.
Her hand pressed against her brother’s pearl in her pocket. She turned her face away.
“Go.”
And then she was alone.
Sophie Constable is an Australian author whose short fiction has been awarded in the Northern Territory Literary Awards, the National Year of Reading Short Story Competition and the online La Campanella Awards. Her novella, Written in the Clouds is available through Amazon. She is currently working on an unruly adolescent of a novel that makes her dog look obedient in comparison.
Historical note: Prior to WWII, half Broome’s population was Japanese. The White Australia Policy of 1901 made an exception allowing Japanese to work and reside in Australia, however they were subject to surveillance and restrictions; undercover intelligence and police officers compiled dossiers on every Japanese person. As such, in June 1941 arrest warrants were issued containing each Japanese resident listed by name, with instructions for them not to be enacted until ordered. Almost every Japanese person in Australia, their spouse (regardless of nationality) and children were arrested and interned within twenty-four hours of the outbreak of war in the Pacific in December 1941.
A Sensible Girl
— Rowena Holloway
I’m a dreamer; everybody says so. Mum’s always telling me to get my head out of the clouds and just the other day I overheard Mrs Allington, my employer, tell one of her boarders, “Saunders is a rather nice girl, but she is always dreaming.”
Even my sweetheart, George, agrees. “Lottie, girl,” he says, “it’s all right for you to have your pretty head in the clouds so long as you keep your feet planted on the ground.” He says he can’t run the best garage in all of Adelaide with a wife who can’t keep her mind on facts and figures. Owning a garage is George’s dream. I tell him his dream is so real it’s infected me. He just laughs. At least, he used to laugh, before he went off to war.
I bite into my apple. Cook said I should take a leg of chicken for my lunch in Botanic Park, but that would only remind me of George and the picnic we had here before he left. So handsome in his uniform, he was. He told me I was to keep him tight in my heart so that I’d never forget him. I said I never would and kissed him, right there in the park where anyone could see. Later, on the crowded platform as the whistle blew and the guard yelled, “Aaall clee-ah,” I kissed him again.
A baby’s crying pulls me from my daydream. The young mother places the squalling baby in her pram and nods at me with a soft smile. Her name is Julia. She lives just the other side of Hackney Road. We’ve talked once or twice. Her man and George enlisted on the same day.
To take my mind off George, I watch the motorcars moving along Botanic Drive. Today, the first day of April sunshine, there are many people in the park and several cars parading by. George says them that can afford motors go past our lovely park to show off what hard work can do for a man. Mr Viners, the butcher, calls George a dirty capitalist and says that it’s the role of the working class to maintain the fabric of society. Mum says there wouldn’t be no society without a woman to keep hearth and home, but I’d never repeat that to Mr Viners.
Old John, who works at the garage, which me and George are saving up to buy, he’s been teaching me a little about engines. So far I’ve only really learned to crank-start a car. Old John says he’d bet sixpence to a penny that most motor problems start with a stall on account of the young ones don’t know how to treat the machines. That’s why he’s teaching me to drive. My George will be so proud of his dreamy girl when he returns this Christmas. I’m certain that by then our boys would have brought an end to the Great War.
That day at the station my handkerchief fluttered fare
well as I smiled through the dirty steam. My tears didn’t fall until the train had shunted well around the bend heading for a ship in Fremantle. If Mum had seen me bawling in public she would have scolded the skin off me, but nobody minded. All us girls were crying into our handkerchiefs: boarding house maids like me, smart girls in tiered skirts that showed their white-stockinged ankles, even old women in stiff black gowns with crow wings on their hats.
In my little spot in the park chirping rainbow lorikeets swoop to and fro on the branches, as if unable to settle, nestling in pairs then taking flight in a burst of chatter. I usually enjoy their games. Lately they are too much like Mrs Allington, who jumps at every pull of the door bell. A peek through the curtains and any sign of a postal uniform is enough for her to collapse into a chair. “You go, Saunders,” she says. “I can’t bear it.”
For over two months now there has been no word of Mr Allington. He’s over in Egypt like my George. I wrote George about him, but he wrote a short note back that infantry don’t know much about them in the Light Horse.
Our resident boarder Mrs Robinson, who is very active in the war effort, has told us that bad news will come by telegram first, but Mrs Allington heard of a woman who got the CO’s letter first and now she fears any kind of letter. Mrs Robinson says she should be more worried about the short rations, the mud and rats in the trenches, and the sickness that plagues those at the Front. She says it won’t be long now before all those in Egypt are sent there. The doctor has told her she is not to speak of such things as it plays on Mrs Allington’s mind so. Doctor says I must make sure my employer rests, and carry smelling salts with me at all times. Even now I have them in my pocket.
Before my George left and Mrs Allington got so weak, I would sit here in the park dreaming of a different life, wearing white dresses with comfortable waists and lace hanging in points near my ankles. Once, on this very park bench, I lifted my skirts just a little. Though there was no-one to see me, I blushed when the breeze caught my ankles. It was as if I’d stepped out without my chemise.
I don’t dream of fancy dresses anymore. I dream of George. I try to imagine what it’s like over there.
A flash of red on Botanic Drive; a beautiful motorcar with a long bonnet and open carriage roars, pushing past the others. Its engine sounds like one of those big cats George and I saw at the circus when we first stepped out. If only he was here to watch. He would tell me all about the motor then laugh at me and call me a tomboy, but he would be ever so pleased. I know he would. Just as I know he would be pleased if I could somehow join him at the Front.
Last month, when George had been gone for nearly six months, I dared to ask Mrs Robinson if there wasn’t some way a girl like me could help with the war effort, that I’d heard that in Belgium there was a woman driving an ambulance. She turned to stare at me as I helped place the fox around her neck, for it was a chilly day for March.
“Where do you get your ideas, girl?” She fixed me with a frosty eye. “The Government in its wisdom would never allow it. Quite right too.”
I kept my eyes low, for Mrs Robinson could stare a girl out of her wits.
“Knitting, girl!” she said. “Mittens, mufflers, socks. That’s what they need.” She turned away, tutting about the cheek of young girls today.
Julia’s baby is crying louder now. “Time for his tea,” Julia tells me, struggling to push the high wheels of the pram through the thick grass.
Every day I think of what Mrs Robinson had said about conditions at the Front. What must it be like for George who only ever dreamed of keeping motorcars purring like kittens? When I told my Mum I wanted to help with the war effort she said I must leave that to my betters. I burst out that I could do what I liked if only I’d been a boy. She turned as pale as the turnip she was peeling.
“Well, I never,” she said, two cherry spots on her thin cheeks. “To think I’d see the day when one of my own family thought they knew better than God as made them.”
Since then I spend an extra hour every Sunday praying for my immortal soul. I’m dreadful sorry for what I said, but every day I see young women walking arm in arm wearing the short cloak and long white aprons of the Nursing Corps.
A horn blasts. A woman screams. The red motorcar has done the circuit and is now bearing down upon Julia and her baby. I’m on my feet and haring towards them, aware of the baby wrapped tight in his pram and the open-mouthed horror on the driver’s face. Julia screams again. The car swerves. It clips the edge of the pram, tossing it aside. A tangle of blanket and wailing baby tumbles across the grass. Julia staggers and collapses. The motorcar jumps the curb, its big wheels biting into the earth before it lurches to a halt.
The squalling baby is red-faced but unharmed. I bundle him up and crawl toward Julia, hampered by the wriggling child and my heavy skirts. Shoes and boots crowd me. Voices rise and drown each other out. I order everyone to get back, half aware that Mum would be shocked to hear me speak so to my betters.
Julia is pale and silent as I check for injuries. She seems unharmed. I remember the salts in my pocket and wave them under her nose until she squirms in protest.
Her eyes fly open. “My baby. My baby!”
I tell her that I have him. That everything is fine. A policeman is called. Julia and her baby are helped home while the young woman driving the car is let off with a warning. Soon there is nothing left to show for the event but the grass stains on my petticoats and the muddy tyre ruts.
The driver lays a delicate, leather-gloved hand on my shoulder. “I say, you’re a sensible girl to have in a crisis. I don’t suppose you’ve thought about nursing?”
“No, Miss. I mean . . .” I smooth my skirts and dare to raise my eyes to her. “I want to drive an ambulance.”
“You can drive?”
“Yes, Miss. That is, I’m learning.”
She fits the crank handle to the car and turns it three times. The car splutters but doesn’t start. I show her what Old John has taught me. Soon the car is purring and she is perched on the driver seat, her silk scarf settled around her dark waves. Finally, she gazes down at me, taking in my grass-stained skirt. I drop my eyes waiting for the same reprimand I had from Mrs Robinson.
“Don’t stand there daydreaming,” she says. “Hop in. I can’t promise you an ambulance, but I can get you close enough.”
Rowena Holloway is an Adelaide-based writer of novels and short stories, dabbling in articles and poetry when the mood takes her. When she isn’t writing, Rowena walks her dog and thinks about writing. Her first novel was a semi-finalist in the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and a short story was selected for the 2011 anthology of Award Winning Australian Writing.
Historical note: The Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was one of the few armies made entirely of volunteers. The 9th Light Horse Regiment was raised at Adelaide. It was initially sent to Cairo but by 1915 saw action in Gallipoli. Australian women were encouraged to maintain society and one famous advertisement rallied women to knit mittens, gloves and scarves for their men overseas. At the start of the war the Red Cross formed Voluntary Aid Detachments, which soon came to be largely comprised of women. Yet it wasn’t until 1916 that the Government recognised the VAD as auxillaries to the medical corps.
The Lake People
— Frances Warren
The house was on the lake, well not really a lake, though Beth insisted on calling it that. The lake was really a dam, man-made and dubbed Blue Rock Lake (dam, damn it). Beth had squealed when she’d first seen the house, a sound that made Dan want to squeeze his eyes shut and hold his hands over his ears or maybe just tell her, “Shut the fuck up.” He did neither, instead he bought the three bedroom house. Beth called it ‘The Lake House’, Dan called it ‘The Dam House’ or ‘The Damned House’, depending on his mood and Lolly, their seven-year-old daughter, called it nothing at all. And they were the reasons that Dan had bought the house — Lolly’s ongoing silence and Beth’s ongoing squeals.
Lolly was their onl
y child and she had never uttered a single word. It was Beth’s leaking tears and rage at Lolly’s silence that had driven them from the city, “No more pitying looks from your sisters, acting sure their little shits are so superior,” Beth often said. And Dan, though not entirely sure that his sisters had ever acted in such a way, nodded and murmured agreement. Blue Rock Dam was hours away from any friends or family and it was Dan that had found the ‘special school’ in town (how Beth had fumed) for Lolly and it was Dan that had organised a ‘compassionate work arrangement’, where he commuted once a fortnight and did the rest of his work from home — as an architect it wasn’t difficult. Dan found that the change was good. There was a stillness to the country that he hadn’t expected and he liked it. Everything was slower here, even Beth slowed her incessant worrying over what she called ‘Lolly’s problem’. She still took her to the child psychologist for an hour and a half a week and the speech therapist (she has no speech, goddamn it) for an hour a week and she still combed websites about autism and Asperger’s and hearing problems (no discernible hearing loss) and learning difficulties and language disorders; but these things lessened, lost their urgency. One month after the move into the lake house (damned house) Beth spoke of going back to teaching and began looking up professional development courses, “to get back into the swing of things.” Dan took long walks around the lake and things were getting better until the day that Lolly spoke.
It was dinnertime and Lolly leant with her forehead against the kitchen window to watch the sun slip, orange and glowing, behind the mountains that bordered Blue Rock Lake and said, “Who are the people under the water?” Her voice was soft, her diction clear. Beth’s water glass fell, tinkling to the floor and for a moment Dan felt that his heart might stop. Then he was moving and he knelt by his daughter, who had just spoken her first words — not Dada, not Mama — but, “Who are the people under the water?”