by Gregory Day
We sat amongst the trees, smoked uncut Players, and listened to the general, sizing him up in the light of that info as he spoke in front of the Union Jack, which he’d draped over a walnut tree. I looked across to Vern and noticed how attentive he was as Freyberg gave us the rundown, such as he knew it. A German landing by sea, a tough fight, a sure victory. In truth the general was issuing us all with boots of clay – the complete bloody opposite of Peter Pan’s light step – but he seemed to have no idea.
Afterwards Vern and myself had our first chat about Adrasteia as we traipsed the dusty path back to Uncle Tassos’.
To my surprise, Vern seemed all of a sudden indifferent to the girl. The proximity of Freyberg had got to him, that’s all I can put it down to. The big general in the grove was like a thing Vern had imagined before things got real, a bookish vision of a classical war. He admitted Adrasteia’s beauty when I remarked upon it – well, it could hardly be ignored – but then he said, ‘You’re keen on her are you, Wes?’ which was like asking if you’d prefer to have no fleas in your armpits, or that the makaroniades hadn’t invaded Greece in the first place, or better still that the war was over and we were back at home fishing on the lake. How could any bastard with a healthy rustle in his pants not be keen on her!
To this day I believe that it was Freyberg who turned Vern’s head inside out, with his flash associations, the way he stood genial but upright with the occult flutter of that Union Jack draped over the walnut tree behind him. Vern had grown up isolated, held back unnaturally at the farm after the death of our mother, while I was away at school. But he was the bright one and while I was away struggling through amo amas amat he’d spent his time escaping into books, into classical dreams of legendary islands like Crete, and reading the poetry of people like Rupert Brooke, people who, he’d now informed us, were Freyberg’s friends. He’d dreamt himself deep into the lines of all those books he’d read, played out his own mythological roles on the slopes of our farm’s volcano, so that as the general put over the prospect of the battle’s importance it sounded like literature to him, something already written.
As we walked the spiny track back towards Uncle Tassos’, I said: ‘What, has this bloody war done your head in, Baby? You sure you’re seein’ what’s right there in front of you?’
We’d always called him Baby back home, and now he just laughed, the beautiful features of his face flung back, as if he knew that I, his run-of-the-mill elder brother, was finally and forever more to take the golden family seat he was vacating. You see in his mind he’d been raised up, ill-starred already, by the prospect of the triumph ahead. When he stopped laughing he put his hand on my shoulder affectionately. Then he took it away, looked straight ahead of him down the track as we walked and said, as if to no-one in particular, ‘It’s the things you can’t see that you’ve gotta see. That’s what’s gonna matter in the end.’
After that conversation, Vern and I never mentioned Adrasteia again. She was simply in our lives during the build-up to the Germans’ arrival, cooking with her uncle on the courtyard fire, sopping down the benches, playing knucklebones with her little cousin Nicko, eavesdropping on as much English as she could, gathering sticks with the donkey by way of reconnaissance for her uncle’s always burning and fiercely independent fire.
*
By the middle of May we’d been hard at it for a couple of weeks with the others in the vicinity of the airfield, wiring in, digging weapon pits, dressing up decoy sangars whilst building decent camouflage for our real positions among the rocks. There were two small hills about a hundred yards apart right next to the airfield which, when the boys of our unit first marched in off the lighter, they’d nicknamed The Charlies, due to their uncanny resemblance to a woman’s breasts. A couple of days after we’d arrived Vern had dreamt that we’d run a string of barbed wire from one nipple to the other of The Charlies, with the idea of knocking out any Bavarian Stuka comin’ in low from the east to strafe the town. It was only a dream but in the light of day it also seemed to stack up as a good idea. It was like something a child would conjure up; that was its beauty I s’pose. When he brought it up in the camp over breakfast and a few of us agreed that it actually wasn’t such a bad idea he began to get excited. ‘I’m gonna let the brass know about it,’ he declared. We all thought he was joking of course but when someone actually remarked that he had Buckleys of getting the CO’s attention he flicked away his cowlick and smiled broadly. ‘I bet ya dinner at the new Australia Hotel I can get ’em to do it.’
Some of the blokes scoffed but Ken Cal took the bet. ‘I’ll have a bit of that spread at the Australia,’ Ken said. Vern became even more het up then. Straightaway he was up on his feet and weaving through the camp. Soon he had the idea passing along the grapevine and up to the cave in the chalky cliffs above the airfield that served as HQ. Lo and behold, next day the word came right back along the vine and the idea was given the nod.
This was some feather in the cap for Vern, but it being a dream we laughed that this time he couldn’t really take any credit. As far as command in the cave was concerned however it didn’t seem to matter whether you dreamt something or thought it up dry, and the strategy was actually advertised for the sake of morale as Private Vernon Cress’ idea. The young private had proven that with the right attitude to our preparations for what lay ahead, you never knew what you might contribute. And if that wasn’t enough, it was also made known, as a kind of further nod to lift our spirits after what we’d been through on the mainland, that Vern and a few of us blokes who were his best mates were to be given the actual responsibility of rigging The Charlies.
Together we worked hard in the sun to set what we now were calling ‘the booby-trap’, to wire in the ends and winch it tight enough from nipple to nipple to work. I can see now how all this must have reinforced the course Vern had set for himself but it was bloody difficult going dragging that wire on foot through the rocky ground in the heat. Still, we had a fair old time regardless, despite the trial and error, knowing pretty much everyone’s imagination had been captured by our task, with plenty of speculation flying about the peccadilloes of the giant young maiden we were trussing, and the blue sky and sea also helping to buoy us along.
Eventually, after a whole day and a half, we had the deadly tripwire strung taut in the air. Vern’s dream had come true. Given the Australia Hotel was twelve thousand miles away he and Ken Cal decided instead to make a celebratory visit early that afternoon back to Uncle Tassos’ villa for some local R&R (rest & raki). Mug and I however liked the look of the water and took the chance to go down into the town for a swim first. Plus from down there we would see if the wire could be spotted from the mole in the harbour where the resemblance of The Charlies was at its most obvious.
We headed down past groups of Black Watch blokes, who despite the warm weather were still in their kilts and tam-o-shanters amongst the coolness of the freshly dug weapon pits. A few of them joked to us about The Charlies as we passed. Mug and I were tickled pink with the attention, and I was especially proud of my little brother. We walked happily down past the fishermen’s moorings and the sponge divers’ piles, out under the swifts circling above the Venetian fortress by the sea.
By the time we got out on the mole we were boiling and straightaway stripped off and dived right in. The water was pure heaven and we dipped and skited like a pair of dolphins. With our heads bobbing we looked back east across the harbour on The Charlies. There they were, a jocular trap dreamt up by my brother in collaboration with the ancient island itself. We were happy to see there was no barbed-wire lingerie visible from that angle.
Afterwards we lay on the stones of the mole in the sun and smoked. There had been German flyovers by this stage but nevertheless Cretans of the old town wandered past us, defiantly continuing their daily constitutionals. I started a letter home and Mug threw in a handline with some hooks he’d got his hands on when we’d landed at Souda. After an h
our or so the sea breeze was luffing the water around Mug’s line and we were drawling happily away. It was a sweet little interlude, and remains so even in recollection, one of the sweetest I remember of the whole war.
By the late afternoon Mug had caught what looked to us like a decent sea bream and was looking forward to presenting it in gratitude to Tassos up at the villa. We set off by way of the streets of the town, until we wound our way back down off the heights beyond the old southern gate and into the scrub towards the villa. But as we came up out of the creekbed, climbing the narrow lane and rounding the white wall into the yard, it was immediately clear there would be no grand presentation.
We found Vern and Adrasteia in the little courtyard under the grapes, with Uncle Tassos quietly stoking the painted stone mouth of the fire nearby. Nothing was said. With the scissors from my kit – I could see from the shapes of gluey tarnish on the blades they were mine – she was cutting Vern’s hair with great care. It had become like straw by then, filthy, first matted by the long retreat from Vevi then dried out by the roll in the leaky caique across the water and the recent salt days in the sun. He sat on a rush-chair with her standing behind, his face in mottled repose from the leaves on the trellis above, his eyes shut, and occasionally with her slightly pudgy hand he would let her turn his head this way or that to get the angle right.
We had stepped lighthearted, with the sea on our skin, as if into the grip of a spontaneous but solemn rite. The rasp of the scissors was loud in the stillness. The air was thick with what was about to be unleashed upon us. The walls of the house, recently whitewashed for Easter, borrowed blues and yellows from the sky.
Mug laid the fish on the grey stone border beside the fire. I remember looking at smoke curling from the fire mouth. I remember Mug’s face, watchful but a little confused, like a child in church. I remember that rasp of the scissors in my brother’s hair, the solidity of Adrasteia’s hips in a dark green and black skirt, her belly pressed tight against Vern’s back.
I remember thinking these people had always known we were coming. Us boys. I also remember wondering how it could be that Uncle Tassos seemed as old as the twisted knots of the overhead vines.
When the atmosphere changed, Uncle Tassos covered the fish with herbs and placed it into the fire mouth on a metal paddle. It cooked quickly, we drank strong raki, and a group of locals suddenly appeared as if drawn by the smell of the dittany. These in fact were men who had already come to be known as Pendlebury’s thugs. Andartes. A large man, a doctor called Dimitris, played a miniature lyre in huge hands like those of a woodchopper, and his elder brother, Nickos, with a black beard surrounding bright red lips, sang. These men all wore the traditional garb, strides we called ‘bog-catchers’, vakres in the local lingo, with coloured cummerbunds around their waists. They had flourishing, outlandish moustaches, and their music was a great exhalation.
Knowing nothing as yet of the historical misery and pride which they were singing of, we danced with a liberation only the Cretan dance can bring. The intensity of Vern’s haircut was released into one magnificent piss-up and celebration, histories were explained on both sides of the ledger, and in the course of it all Mug Wylie was heralded as a natural fisherman.
I talked to Adrasteia that night as we came together during the dance with great ease. In my relief and happiness I attempted to tell her about the old volcano and lake back home, how much plough-twanging scoria was scattered through our paddocks – as much, I said, as the ever-present rubble of Crete – and I described the walls that, like the people of her island, we built from it. I explained how in our country the south was cold not warm, and how the arc of green slopes and the buckled crater walls of our farm meant we were experts in fat lambs. I took pride that night in my lineage and my fathers’ farming acumen but told her how I’d been sent away to school whilst Vern had been kept back on the land with Dad, and how it should have been the other way around. And she said simply: ‘You are so far from home.’
That night Mug, Ken and I slept in the upstairs room of the villa, while Vern with his newly cropped hair fell asleep like a young prince in his clothes on a bench of gypsum by Uncle Tassos’ fire. He’d hardly touched a drop.
III
To Leonie’s father Nat Fermoy I was just another damned remnant of the war when I first washed up here. He’d seen them the first time: wandering, stooping, limping through the biffo of the weather; narrow-gutted, half-shickered, spooked, stopping only to thumb a coin for his little girl, his motherless Leonie, who seemed to be attracted to these misshapen ghosts. There was nothing Nat could do to stop her roaming the island – she was as much its child as his after all – but if he came upon them at some rare junction of the roads, a one-armed wretch stooping like a reed over her own small figure, he’d quickly drag her away across the flatness of the land. ‘You back off,’ he’d say, on the cart going back home to Tuck White’s old block in the north-east and she’d stay silent. ‘Those men are dangerous. They could hurt you,’ and she’d pull her duffel coat around, thinking that kindness isn’t dangerous and danger isn’t kind.
So when I first showed up over twenty years later, and plonked myself down between the campfire and a patch of ten sheoaks on the aerodrome road, I was nothing particularly new. More like an old piece of furniture, in fact, another round of jetsam from the nation. Only difference was that I wasn’t on the lookout for free land, though I s’pose you couldn’t tell that just by looking.
It is my actual belief – take it or leave it – that most Australians are not joiners. A mistrust of institutions is not an inability to love, I used to tell Lascelles. A liking for solitude, or even loneliness, is not an enemy of compassion, I’d say. I already knew by the time I’d arrived on King that any kind of real independence is impossible. Just bullshit. I wanted nothing to do with Australia or its handouts but not because I thought I could be free. My notions of freedom went down in a not-quite-hollow ship. But what I hadn’t learned by the time I washed up here was the infinite nature of love. Not the romantic love of one man for his maid, not even deep, abiding friendship or the tidal love of a parent for a child, but the vast well of universal love from which all these affections come. Love like the ocean and bigger than any of us. Love like the weather. Brutal love that can change and recover. After loss. After loss and after it’s been slung and filleted on the bare rock of the world.
*
On the day that I arrived here on King, when I first caught sight of it from the crayboat as we approached, it was the height of the paperbark stands that made an impression. Also the way the cloud, the lenticular they call it, just hovered there above the island, like some meteorological parachute attached to the body of the land with invisible strings. I’d caught a ride with the Shirley boys from Lorne, who were over for the big summer crays, and from the plunge of their deck I could see the strata: white surf like the foam of beer against the kelp-lipped rocks, the low rise of the coasty hummocks and pastures, then the paperbarks, then the parachute of the lenticular hovering there. But almost as soon as I registered the cloud it started moving, from west to east right over our heads.
A part of me already knew that the things I had to surmount here would be, like the weather, hard to come to grips with. There one minute and gone the next. So for a moment, as the boat bumped in and the decky put out his smoke and readied the ropes, I panicked. Even out here I wondered where I would hide, with no one left and nothing still or solid to hold onto. A surge of giant bull-kelp over the side expressed it too. Humbled I felt. Again. Unlike Crete, this island is a raw and level place, and I, like the paperbark trees, felt I’d be sticking out like nobody’s business.
As I said goodbye to the Shirleys, disembarked from the boat and walked up the hill from the ocean, I soon realised I could take the roads alone but never get beyond the sound of the roar. Mum had told me coming out of mass in Colac as a child that just south of us, over the Otways, in the waters of Bass S
trait, there were islands rife with snakes. We’ll never be taking you out there, she’d said with a smile. But somehow, in my little head, I imagined those islands in a way she didn’t intend: as places where guilt was present but easily accounted for. Where its deadly venom (which I knew well, from the sermons in church) was standing to attention. Where no matter who they were or what they’d done, people could cop it sweet and still survive.
Up in the northwest here, at Phoques Bay, there’s another tiny island out on the water that’s a fair dinkum Celtic lace of snakes. Black tigers. And so it was uncanny that when I finally stopped on that first day, and made my bare camp by the ten sheoaks on the aerodrome road, that Leonie Fermoy came cycling by, and without really even introducing herself, leant her bike into the whispering of the sheoaks, sat down by the fire, and started telling me all about it.
She seemed almost as tall as a paperbark herself, and thin; she wore trousers in the manner of a man and had a mass of ropey white hair that stuck out at the back like a spoonbill’s bob and fell across her face in the wind as she talked. She had no idea of the pictures in my head. Or so I thought.
Two Chinamen took on that other little island, like Chinamen will, she told me, and she reckoned Chinamen didn’t fear snakes. ‘They have a relationship with them,’ she said, as I rolled a smoke and observed what I thought was her rather articulate use of the word.
‘But I have a relationship with them too,’ I eventually said, a little sarcastic.
‘Yeah, you and the sharp end of your shovel.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll never get rid of ’em, just like they’ll never be rid of me.’