by Gregory Day
‘Well,’ she scoffed. ‘We all have to die somehow.’ I remember thinking about this, then thinking about Vern, and sizing her up even further. ‘Yair, but not from guilt,’ I muttered, licking my Tally-Ho.
Leonie finished up that curious first hello of hers; she stood up in that bare spot by the ten sheoaks, got back on her bike and cycled on without so much as a wave let alone an explanation. I was left alone to wonder. But before I had a chance to work it out that other face came through my mind again, from the night when the stink of sulphur faded: the way she too took me unawares, how light I was, how I needed to be light, not as a feather but as an act without consequence.
IV
Morning light cleansed the spartan room. I stood up out of my blanket, flicked my dog tags round and crossed to the window. I looked north across the island towards the water and saw The Charlies beside the airfield, the string of wire between them still invisible from that angle. All this was true and yet, as in a dream, I can only presume what it was that I saw.
I stepped away then, back into the room, and over Ken and Mug to the plain shard of mirror hanging on the painted stone wall.
The morning’s heat had begun to rise but my whole body went suddenly cold. In the mirror before me were new eyes. They’d been brown as soil until that moment, reddy-brown like the scoria, sometimes browny-black like the Barwon, just a shade away from black itself. But they were brown no longer.
Swimming in the clean marine light of that second storey my eyes had turned green. Brightly, unmistakably so. They stared back at me, acidic, wide, and terrified.
It seemed that, like Vern, I had been bloody well possessed. Wesley Cress had green eyes. As if born for a second time, to a second mother, a second sky, a second sea, to another world beyond the likes of Mug and Ken lying there in their kits on the floor.
V
Not long after her first visit to my camp Leonie Fermoy sold me a sausage roll in the co-op in Currie. Wearing a shiny dubbined leather apron that almost seemed too heavy for her frame. The land agent Bill Murray was waiting outside for me in his Standard Tourer, so I didn’t say much, thanked her I s’pose, and went off to look at some ground.
The land agent was a quiet chap. No blarney there. Which was just as well, given the mood I was in. We drove round the island in silence that day, looked through the fences at what turned out to be Fermoy scrub up north-east of Egg Lagoon, but they wanted too much for it. Which meant they weren’t selling at all. Bill Murray told me they rated the island higher than most, the Fermoys, rated themselves for that matter, and fair enough too. Old Nat Fermoy Senior had come in off an American whaler in the long ago. The family had gone nowhere ever since. It made complete sense to me that the woman who’d parked her bike by my fire was one of them.
Though it was slow going I persisted with Bill Murray who, although he never talked much, knew how to keep you on the hook. He’d drive me round, to meet the folks, if you like. We’d sit in island kitchens down south towards Stokes Point and up north at Wickham, drink tea and eat scones with people who didn’t want to sell, or didn’t know it yet. But soundings like that seemed accepted, a part of life, and we were company too. You can’t play cards with the pheasants after all. And everyone understood Bill’s position. He had to do his duty and, given the fluctuating price of beef and lamb and such, the vagaries of the barge-transport, well you might just decide right there on the spot, right there with a jawful of jam and cream and scone, that you wanted to sell after all. Though it was unlikely.
In truth, I was getting a tour of the island. And when I wasn’t I’d sit in my camp and read and try to work out what to do about Vern now that I didn’t have any family left to shelter from the facts. That was tough and by god I was flinty about it all. They were the days when everyone wanted to forget the war, especially the embarrassing bits. Time and circumstance had cast their lots, and there I sat, exposed by a blowy fire in the roadside camp, vulnerable on all sides but one to the powers of the strait – the ten sheoaks being my windbreak in the southwest quarter.
I’d smoke. Read Vern’s old copy of Epictetus the stoic, which I’d salvaged from our abandoned house on Corangamite when I first came back. Dad had died while I was away, having had the telegrams that Vern and I were both missing in action. I was the only one left, apart from Uncle Den, who filled me in and helped me sell the farm when I made it clear I wanted no part of it.
For no reason that I could make out Leonie began showing up at any odd hour, muddy or clean, with burrs and animal hair through her suedes and corduroys. She started bringing me things: a folding canvas chair, flour for damper, and neatly cut kindling. Until Bill Murray could find me something, it was all I had, my little camp, but she was fast becoming my host. That much was bloody obvious. It was her island. Her father’s island. Nat Fermoy. And his father’s. Old Nat Fermoy. So, like tit for tat, I started to tell her about our place, about the farm and the lakes.
But – it was uncanny again, just like the snakes – she had relations on her mother’s side, the Burrows, who I’d known as a kid. From just northeast of Colac, at Ondit, ten mile or so from us. She’d actually gone there as a child, across the strait on the crayboats and over the leechy wet ridge of the Otways by horse, right past our gate as a matter of fact, and there was nothing much I could tell her about it that she didn’t already know. Except for what I found when I’d returned to the farm: the stock all gone, the windows smashed, and some old swaggy from Skipton asleep on the scoria under the pittosporum.
Probably to put some flesh on the bare bones of my situation she began to speak herself. She told me about her grandfather’s arrival on the island. About the way he got his land. Then about how her father came to use it. Then her mother’s arrival, the marriage to Nat and her own birth. It was like the flippin’ family deed, I remember thinking at the time. But that was the start of her letting me get to know her. That was her way. It was an old ballad, each generation of Fermoys had its own verse. But once she got to the point where she was born, the music stopped.
Bill Murray the land agent might have been having difficulty finding me a spot to prop but it seemed Leonie’s grandparents, Old Nat and Patsy Ballyhoura, had no such trouble. And they didn’t have to spend a penny. Arriving right here at Naracoopa in Nat’s curagh in the 1800s, they were told if they went over to the west side there was land near the Yellow Rock river on Phoques Bay where no one would object to them knocking up a shelter. It turned out true, no one did seem to mind them propping on that cloud-ramming stretch in the maw of the westerlies. And for Nat it was a pretty good compromise between life on sea and land. He learnt how to snare wallabies, and from Yellow Rock he could look out towards twelve and a half thousand miles of unbroken water, most of which he’d rolled over in various boats searching for oil and ambergris. Anyway, as Leonie told it, by the time Grandmother Patsy had given birth to Leonie’s father and Uncle True it was fairly well accepted that the spot where Nat and Patsy built the house, and the spread of wattle and paddock dune around it, was the Fermoys’.
She carried on then by the smoky fire, about her dad, Young Nat, as he was known, and how he was an abstemious wind hater who crossed to the opposite side of the island as soon as he was old enough, and how he’d no interest in the sea or skins but as a kid got a taste for farming beef and had hitched himself to a fella called Tuck White who was the first to bring Angus cattle onto King. This fella Tuck White had never credited a Fermoy with having a clue about stock and land but her dad persisted as a young bloke and never let up until Tuck White couldn’t avoid the use of him and had taken him on.
And then, unnerved as I could so easily be in those days by the unbidden edge of brother Vern’s voice calling again in my ears, I said: ‘And you’ve got no one else to tell all this to?’
Her face went plain, even paler than it already was, her skin translucent, her cheekbones catching the light. She’d been right to imagine I’d be
en comforted by her yarn; even more than that, it was a reprieve she’d brought, the way she’d roll in with her bike and her kindling. But as her ballad had wandered on something had cast me back, into the bitterness of things, and suddenly this young woman on the other side of the fire, with her high-boned face and all the time in the world on her hands to tell a stranger her legacy, seemed nothing short of balmy.
Pain hollows us out, you see, kills the kindness. Less than a minute later she was pedalling back to the turn-off and I was alone with the smoke again, smouldering. My brother’s voice was calling, the mythological seas around Crete he’d so much looked forward to were hissing at me, full of tragic water.
VI
Before the true horrors of the German landing arrived we did have info of what might be coming – intelligence, the nobs call it – and we certainly had fears, fears which were part-mocked and part-exacerbated by Lord Haw-Haw’s ‘Germany Calling’ broadcasts, which sometimes we’d gather round a wireless set in a kaphenoi in Iraklio to hear. I remember the night when through the crackle and static we could just make out the plummy propaganda voice announcing that Hitler had a bullet for every leaf and a bomb for every olive on Crete. And another night in particular when, much to our cocky amusement at the time, Haw-Haw ridiculed us Australians specifically, and went on to pronounce Kriti as an island of doomed men and sunken ships.
On the day my eyes changed colour in the upstairs room all such conjecture came to an end. It was late in the afternoon, around five o’clock. We’d been down at The Charlies all day, running a second string of wire between the nipples, just like young scallywags setting a square hook. This time though the shock came not from a snap freeze in the weather, as it had at Vevi, nor from a shard of the mirror, but from the open sky when hundreds of coloured brollies of the Fallschirmjaeger suddenly appeared over the water.
From that moment on, hell ruled the island. Tiny Freyberg had expected the Germans to come by sea but instead from the air the brollies came down, in a slow, insidious drift. Were they dots in front of our eyes, a mirage of the heat? No, they came and then they began to land, to become indisputably real. They fell into quarries and fountains, onto beaches and spits, into lanes and backyards and into dried-up riverbeds. We found maps on some of those poor buggers later. They couldn’t have known how imprecise their task would be because it had never been done before. Truth was, no matter whose side you were on, the whole joint became a human abattoir from that deadly drop on.
I remember running through the dusk back to Tassos’ villa, where we’d set up anti-aircraft guns on the roof, in anticipation of German air support for the ships we’d been told to expect. Vern was already ahead of me, sprinting. Before we could even begin to work out what was possible a disquieting squall descended, the loud whoosh and shadow of an enormous orange parachute slanting down into the scrub beside the little lane above the house. A few days previous Vern had traded a bottle of Tassos’ wine to a bloke from Black Watch for a fannie – a lethal British Expeditionary Force combat weapon: half-knife, half-knuckleduster – and I watched as he pounced on that Bavarian like a half-starved roo-dog set free on the chase. The bloke was caught up in his strings and wires with silk ballooning all round him. Vern leant deep into the colour and with one swipe of his Corangamite forearm slashed the Kraut’s throat. He pushed him back like a ragdoll into the oleanders, the paratrooper’s serrated curtain of blood falling onto the flowers. Vern didn’t hesitate. He kept tearing on up the road. My brother. Our baby bush scholar. His destiny had obviously arrived.
*
I had a sense Vern was headed for trouble but my search for him over the next couple of hours bore no fruit. And for the next nine days the north coast of the island became a deadly shemozzle. Any pre-ordained notion of strict lines, front or reserve, or strategic cohesion was soon destroyed by the brolly drop. Our structures, all set for the sea invasion, were blurred, by lunchtime of the following day. No one knew what the hell was going on. The night had been murderous, with stray Germans roaming everywhere and the locals quickly rising to the occasion. You could turn a bend on an empty looking road only to find a single German paratrooper shucking off his heavy kit in the moonlight, and in that moment he could simply raise his Mauser and shoot.
As a result, Mug and Ken and I found ourselves using the high ground of Tassos and Adrasteia’s house as a kind of base, and also as a place to drag the horribly wounded and the suddenly dead, whilst Vern was god knows where.
During those terrible days Tassos was often elsewhere too. He fell immediately in line under Pendlebury’s command that first afternoon but had to range beyond his ken when the legendary Englishman went missing the day after. As we came and went, our ears splitting under the noise of the Stukas, I would see Tassos only occasionally and he kept assuring me that everything was under control. There were German corpses in piles by the road, he said, they were hanging from the trees where they’d been tangled in their parachute wires as they fell.
Almost all the Cretans in the Iraklion area, not only those like Tassos and Adrasteia who were already involved with Pendlebury’s networks, had risen to take whatever they could find and gone out into the landscape to kill. Just as Tassos had said they would. In the dusk of that first terrible day, in a low cutting by an old stone watermill, only two or three miles from the Morosini fountain in the middle of town, I saw a pot-bellied priest with a long salt and pepper beard struggling with all his might to retrieve an antique-looking sword he’d driven into the guts of a dangling Kraut. I hid warily, at first confused then actually embarrassed by what I was witnessing, until the horror of the paratrooper’s cries flushed me out. Springing from the bushes I wrested the carved handle from the old priest in a rush and wrenched it out midst the yowls of the dying Kraut. As the long blade came free of his Fallschirmjaeger tunic he went limp, and silent. The priest and I looked at each other, as if questioning whether we should do something right by the body. Or that’s what I thought we were doing. But then through the small gap in his beard the priest made a brief intonation, just a small sound, a heh, out of buried lips. He grabbed his sword from my grip with a look of disdain, turned and walked away. There was no sympathy, no thanks of course, and no remorse. He didn’t even wipe the blood-smeared sword on the ground or against his robes.
Personally I was reeling by nightfall of the second day. There were no longer cul de sacs. Only deeds to destroy a lifetime. As the blood kept spewing out under the heat in those first few days, boiling and spluttering in different calibrations of surprise and confusion, the German dead behind our lines were piling up and beginning to stink, some just rotting in the sun by the roadsides, some flung misshapen into the dry trunks of the ilex, some grouped together at designated points for mass burial in shallow graves. The problem was the rock-hard ground, it was difficult enough trying to bury your own shit, let alone a six-foot German. And given that we needed cover from the relentless fire overhead the best that could be done on most occasions was a rushed scratching roughly eighteen inches deep, barely covering the victim, and in most cases not even sealing off the smell of his decomposition.
It was around this time that, between forays out into the field, I began helping Adrasteia and others as the injured were brought in for treatment at the villa. I didn’t like staying back there, there was fighting to be done and I was also terrified that the next one to be brought in would be Vern, but when she asked I couldn’t refuse. I would work by her side for a few hours at a stretch, take orders from her, and marvel at her readiness for the task, her coolness under pressure for one so young, and the way her practicality never erased the tenderness and sympathy that meant so much to those in trouble. We worked well together, in extremely difficult circumstances, and I quickly put aside my own feelings of inadequacy as a nurse.
In the middle of that second night, or perhaps it was the third, a badly injured soldier was carried into Tassos’ courtyard on an old wooden door by two Cr
etans. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed him being laid down for Adrasteia to attend to. The side of his skull had been sliced open, his ear had somehow been dislodged, but on closer look, with his head propped up in her hands, I saw through the gloom that the smashed up soldier was our mate Ken Callinan.
I rushed in, plunging my hands into the mess to try and reorganise his features to at least resemble the fella I knew. But it was no good. He was struggling, beyond pain it seemed. Eventually Adrasteia laid the mess of his head back down on her thighs and he seemed to go somewhere far away from us. As desperate as I was to do something for him there was no question of it. I had to surrender. And so no doubt did he, in a manner of speaking. I watched as his struggle disappeared, he was miles away, then an eternity. For a moment, more than anything else, I was stunned. Then the screaming of Stukas recommenced above our heads and it was clear the battle would stop for no-one.
VII
The day after I’d insulted Leonie at my camp by the ten sheoaks, I spent another morning and afternoon waiting unsuccessfully for some news from Bill Murray, and with ideas of retribution coming thick and fast and repeated like the squalls and knots off the open water – ways I could get back at the world, ways I could get back at the Poms, how I could continue fighting now that fighting was illegal, how I’d redraft Vern’s ‘missing in action’ telegram that was delivered to Dad out at Corangamite – yes, it was with fronts and affronts such as these furrowing through my head, as if the weather had intentions like mine and that’s why it was so cold, so persistently damp, yet abrupt and inhospitable to my camp, that without warning I found myself, and with equal intensity, wanting her to come back. But she never showed and, by the time night fell, I lay compounded in the darkness on my swag, craving her company like sunlight.