Archipelago of Souls

by Gregory Day

  The next day Bill Murray’s Standard Tourer pulled up early and the top was down because the sun was momentarily out. He hadn’t ordered a soft-top, he’d told me when I first suggested that King Island was a strange place to be driving a convertible. The Tourer was what had arrived on the barge from Melbourne and he hadn’t been bothered to send it back. He took his chances when they came and had grown to like the feeling of having the top down. But in those weeks when we were visiting the island kitchens together we were forever having to stop to concertina the rusted spokes of the old black hood back over again. In the state I was in it nearly drove me screwy.

  Where he took me that day was to the Robinsons’ on the Sea Paddock Road down south near Pearshape, and the first thing I noticed as we pulled in through the shadows of the paperbarks was her pushbike leaning against the post and rail.

  I was there to make a good impression but straightaway things became confused. Bill Murray got out of the car and naturally expected me to follow. But I was ashamed and had no more room, none whatsoever, not even for a hint of humiliation.

  ‘So are you right then?’ he said, looking back to find I hadn’t moved from the passenger seat.

  We heard the sound of a tractor coming our way on the other side of the driveway trees, and then the farmer himself was steering through an old pony run to park beside the sawn-off wood tank on the half-painted southwest wall of the house.

  As Brian Robinson hailed Bill Murray everything seemed exposed in the light, especially me not getting out, sitting warped behind the glossy reflections of the trees on the Tourer’s windscreen.

  Brian Robinson giddayed Bill with a rigorous handshake. He seemed cheery as the morning sky and something about the uncomplicated nature of his manner finally drew me out of the car. As if I didn’t want to be responsible for ruining the break in the weather.

  We went inside, into a dining room of unsealed boards, which I remember well because of a spring lamb curled up in a similarly raw apple box by the fire. We sat in a large windowed recess, not a bay window proper but there was a round table topped with lino and full of the sun. Behind us, through a plastered arch and beyond where the lamb lay sleeping in front of the fire, we could hear women’s voices in the kitchen.

  Brian Robinson whistled through his fingers and a tanned looking woman with lots of black and grey curls appeared through a swinging door. She seemed as happy as her husband. We greeted her politely then I looked away. Through the window I could see what looked to me like wire ferret cages, stacked back behind tea-tree craypots, and the bicycle leaning a little way off against the fence. I found it odd to see the cages as there’s no rabbits on the island.

  Mrs Robinson said she wouldn’t chat, she had ‘Leonie Fermoy in the kitchen here to see about the wounded’. So we said yes, we’d take a whiskey with our tea. ‘Aah, that’s good then,’ said Brian, clapping milker’s hands to complete the transaction as she went off through the swinging door.

  The land agent was quiet as usual, next to useless as an intermediary in a situation like that, so Brian Robinson started to strike up with me. Asked me straight out where I’d served and then why the bloody hell I wasn’t takin’ ’em up on the soldier settlement scheme. I said something snooty like I don’t take charity and he scoffed loudly.

  ‘Charity!’ he said, sending spittle flying. ‘That’s not charity, son. That’s a fuckin’ prison sentence. Have you seen the blocks they’re offloadin’ onto those poor mongrels? Shitty ground, full of tare and widow-makers, tarted-up swamp. I was in the hotel recently and some poor bastard was askin’ what to do with that type of bush. So I told him straight out. “Do what the government does, mate.” And he says, “What’s that?” And I said, “Give it away.”’

  Bill Murray started chuckling at the joke and I smiled too.

  ‘Yair, I dunno about your logic there, Wes,’ he went on. ‘It certainly ain’t charity you’re refusin’. I’d say someone’s lookin’ after you coz you’re better off out of it. You’d sink like a stone.’

  It’s true that some people have a gift for conversation and a way of placing people at their ease. The settlement scheme couldn’t be all bad but Brian’s approach was making me feel better. As he chatted away and his wife, Rose, brought in whiskey and tea and a boiled egg each – on account of the fact it was Brian’s morning tea-time and he always had an egg – I relaxed, the persistent nausea lightened, and we ranged over the topics of the farm and what was possible.

  As it turned out the Robinsons weren’t interested in selling the land down there near Pearshape, but another sixty acres they had back up above Naracoopa. It was too small a block for there to be much serious interest and it was too far up the island now for Brian to bother running sheep on it like he had. His tractor was his only motorised vehicle, and he’d decided after bumping into Bill in town that it might suit us both for him to offload the sixty acres onto me.

  While we got into the meat of what was on offer I heard a door slam and then Mrs Robinson and Leonie were standing right there in the yard outside the window. They had their backs to us, discussing the cages. I remember Leonie had a green and white beanie on, with her hair falling out the bottom of it like the leftover wool hadn’t been tied off. Bill and Brian just carried on, arranging for us all to walk the ground near Naracoopa later that week, but I was only half-listening. I wouldn’t even have admitted it to myself at the time but in truth I was wanting to catch her eye, to give a sign that she should at least pedal that pushbike back along to my camp sometime, that despite what I’d done she was welcome.

  She walked forward with Mrs Robinson and they pointed at various cages. Then Leonie leant in, picked one up and opened the wire hatch. They seemed to agree on it and so they turned back for her to strap it onto her packrack and be off.

  It was as she turned that Mrs Robinson pointed us out: three blokes eating eggs and drinking whiskey and tea there on the other side of the window.

  Leonie stared, as if any surprise she might have felt was doused by a passing amusement. A smile snuck into her face. I dunno but surely she wasn’t finding it funny that we were eating eggs and drinking whiskey at ten o’clock in the morning. Brian Robinson helloed her with a thick pink palm and Bill Murray nodded and I put down my grey spoon. I didn’t want to be a laughing stock.

  But then I too raised my hand, not the friendly hand of a hale islander but a hand which, with a single sunlit gesture, confessed my need to give and receive.

  VIII

  I was out on Apex Hill, from which we’d fought back through the German lines over the previous few days. It was the ninth day of the battle and we were in control, but news had just come through, first as a rumour and then as official decree, of our surrender. Jeeps and motorbikes roared back and forth spreading the news, saying that we had lost the Maleme airfield near Souda Bay in the west of the island, which meant the Germans were free to re-arm. This meant that, despite the fact that we’d been winning the fight around Iraklio, we were strategically stuffed and had to go.

  Mug and I agreed that surely someone had got the wrong end of the stick. It was as if a bogus bulletin from Lord Haw-Haw was somehow being treated as fact. For the next few hours everyone was in a scramble trying to get verification that it was a hoax but it never came. And by late afternoon it seemed the surrender was deadset. We were leaving. Running away. Again. Just like we had at Vevi. To the west, hordes of other units had already begun the long march to the south coast for boats, but we were instructed to hold tight, to await ships that would take us out from Iraklio harbour at night.

  A terrible surging feeling. That was what was caused by this in most of us, a fair dinkum resentment against what we quickly concluded were the blues of command. As Mug and I were marching back to Tassos’, in the hope of more info, the air was charged with bitter pride and blokes had started going a bit berserk, sticking in harder than ever, pummelling the mortar shells and anti-ai
rcraft fire from positions we’d worked hard to establish in the previous days.

  There was a blind madness to it all. Enough was enough. My eyes were peeled for Vern as we passed groups of soldiers. I never saw him but I had a fair idea what his attitude would be. I noticed some of the blokes had already started drinking. Drinking as they fought. Swigging from local bottles and demijohns. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to any stray Bavarian caught out during those hours. In the minds of many of us who’d copped it over Easter at Vevi if we were being forced to surrender it wouldn’t be without a fight. If that makes any sense at all. Which of course it doesn’t.

  When Mug and I got back to the villa there was no sign of Vern but Tassos was there, stoking the fire in the courtyard as if nothing extraordinary had happened. We began to rabbit on to him about the surrender but he looked unimpressed.

  I could hear Adrasteia talking and the sound of an injured soldier moaning from upstairs. Tassos bade us sit as he tidied his teeth with a prunus sprig. He made it clear the fight had only just begun. When we said no, it’s about to end, we were to be evacuated from the harbour, he just sprigged his teeth some more and stoked the fire.

  I wanted to know where Vern was. Tassos said he’d seen our boys on the grog. His implication was that Vern was amongst them. I thought he had a higher opinion of my brother than that. His face was drained of its typical enthusiasm, he had a deadpan, if not cynical, look. This was almost as terrifying as the German fire overhead as I’d come to anchor myself in his unshakeable confidence over the previous days.

  He shared the scanty meat he was roasting with us, we ate snails and Adrasteia brought out bread and meagre leaves of salad and potato. Then, when night had fallen and we had eaten hungrily, Tassos suggested that Mug go out looking for Vern. This also was confusing as it would have been more natural if I had gone. But when I protested, he insisted.

  As soon as we were left alone his face relaxed and his voice assumed a business-like tone. He began to outline in great detail his work for Pendlebury. And now that Pendlebury was dead and his body stowed in a secret place where no prying Hun could deface it or prise his glass eye out as a trophy, he and his ‘thugs’ would redouble their efforts.

  ‘It is now, on the day of defeat, that we are at our most powerful,’ he assured me.

  Some time later, with no sign of Mug’s return, we drank some raki and Tassos continued his accounts of the andartes’ plans which would swing into action in the following days. He made the terrifying tasks ahead of his fellow Cretans sound attractive. It was noble to fight for freedom and your homeland, especially by comparison with what seemed the hapless failures of our own armies so far in Greece. As he spoke I watched the juniper coals in the fire mouth glow like miniature burning cities under the command of his stick.

  Adrasteia sat across from us, on the other side of the fire against the courtyard wall, where she had cut Vern’s hair only a few days before. Her eyes were trained intently on her uncle.

  We heard shouts and rifle fire in the near distance. Tassos raised his hand for quiet and listened.

  ‘Your friends are going mad,’ he said. ‘They are twice betrayed. By the Germans and the British.’

  We leaned towards the sounds a while longer, trying to make out what it was we heard. And then, as if his island was all there was in the world of right and wrong, as if an old man’s wisdom was the ideal complement to the beauty of a young woman, Tassos made his surprising appeal, not to my desire for revenge or to my pride in persistence, but to its opposite.

  ‘Life doesn’t have to be like that. Find a place to put down your burden. Take a walk with my niece, into the olives. Let her be your guide.’

  She stared straight at her uncle, but did not rise from her seat. As if a spell was being cast I sat motionless also, until on the other side of the courtyard wall the shouting and gunfire eventually died away.

  IX

  I didn’t see Leonie again till a fortnight after the meeting at the Robinsons’ and by then I’d walked the ‘Wait-a-While’ acres with Brian and decided it’d do. It was fenced for stock, had an outlook east across Sea Elephant Bay along the ridge of higher ground, and a nice slope away from the ridge at the ocean end for a dwelling. There were two creeks running through it but it was a plateau really, not sedgy country like Brian said the settlement scheme would have offered. We agreed on a price. Bill Murray took his slice, a nice thick slice I’d say, with butter and honey, but that was fair enough given all the tea and scones and cream I’d had because of him. Brian wanted a fortnight to move his sheep for sale down to Grassy Harbour, he offered me the lean-to hayshed, and the hay, and we shook on it. So I was dropped off back at my camp for the last time by Bill Murray and my days of touring the island in the soft-top Tourer were over.

  I had a fortnight to whittle away but it would be accurate to say I temporarily felt a lot better about things having purchased the land. I even got to thinking in a proud kind of way about it, which was perfectly natural although I kept an edge sharpened even with respect to that emotion. Nevertheless by beating the settlement scheme I felt proven in my self-image as a man for whom the scales had fallen from the eyes.

  Given her smile in the yard at the Robinsons’ I half expected Leonie’s bicycle to come by my camp at any moment. Of course I had fresh news now, not just haunted looks or sullen silence and I was keen to share it with someone. She was the only someone there was.

  But she never showed. One day around lunchtime I trekked into Currie with the idea if I bought another sausage roll from the co-op and she saw my face it might spur her on to cycle down to me after her shift. But when I got to the co-op there was no sign of her. And I didn’t feel like eating anyway.

  I loitered around under the Norfolk saplings, hoping she might turn up. I patted a border collie who lingered about and decided when I got onto Wait-a-While I’d get one. Someone other than her to talk to. But I never did get that dog.

  Eventually I trudged back along the flat road to my camp. Once again I sat in low with my back to the sheoaks’ whisper and waited in the weather for nightfall, my fire buckling in the patchy rain and wind. Night came to the rock in the sea, I had no nightmares back then, it was all when I woke. A mixed blessing, I s’pose. Anyway, the next day the light was pewter, I had a can of beans and some bacon on the fire for breakfast and was huddling like a heron in my grey coat on my perch, when she mercifully appeared.

  Straight-off I noticed a green cake tin on the packrack of her bike. She told me later on that she wasn’t going to open it unless I deserved it. Well, as far as I was concerned, she was simply an abatement coming in over the water. She opened proceedings with a crack about there being good red meat for sale in Currie that wouldn’t give me the runs like tinned beans. And, from I know not where, I managed a tasteless joke about having got used to the smells of my own solitude.

  Leonie lit a cigarette and as I took my beans off the boil and dished them up there seemed nothing much to say. She didn’t get up and leave, which I took as some kind of sign, though I wasn’t sure of what. So, by way of thanks, I s’pose, and to ease the difficulty, I asked her straight out if her old man had ever kicked on and got a herd of his own Angus beef.

  Her head pushed back as she took a prolonged and stern sighting of me from the other side of the fire. Draping one leg over the other on the stump where she sat, she fished out a cigarette packet from a pocket somewhere in her riding jacket and offered me one, and a light from a guttering flame on a twig she pulled from the fire.

  Our bodies hunched and extended as pockety fronts passed over between snatches of sun. She unwound a long story about her father’s early trips across the water with Tuck White in pursuit of Victorian cattle breeds, and how they’d resulted in him meeting her mother, whose own father was selling ahead-of-their-time Brangus hybrid heifers that nobody else wanted at the saleyards at Colac. She was very detailed about the bree
ds and how Nat had managed when still a teenager to bring the unwanted Brangus cows back across the water to King where they had famously flourished. And then, with me well and truly on the hook, she wound it all up with the oddest thing: a strange family dream her mother’s father, Warren Burrows from Ondit, had had on the night Nat had married his daughter.

  They’d married in Beeac, as it happens where my own parents were hitched, and set out on horseback to cross the Otway ridge for the boat at Lorne straight after the wedding. That night Warren Burrows, back in his single cot beside his wife’s in the flat paddocks at Ondit, with his two sons already laid down in the soil of France, dreamt of a massive leviathan, so big it was biblical but nevertheless palpable, breaching out of the waters of young Nat Fermoy’s Bass Strait, bellying high over the Otway ridge and, in a sky the grey colour of wood-duck down, flying over the farms towards Colac town where it eventually, and no mistaking its target, came crashing down in a gargantuan organic bomb, right on top of the newly completed war memorial in the Murray Street civic gardens. The memorial stone, with its plaques and columns, was obliterated, the sacrificial humpback blubber flew, hundreds of squelching gouts of leviathan flesh and oil and grease and ambergris and other innards bespattering the town. To Warren Burrows the message of the dream was clear. The unforeseen meeting of the young sweethearts at the saleyards, and the coming betrothal, was both a sacrificial and satisfactory event.

  As Leonie recounted the strange dream her grandfather had had on his daughter’s wedding night, and as I, who’d kicked a football as a kid in the shadows of the Murray Street memorial on family trips to the town for provisions, listened, the very sea around us seemed to grow rich with a buttressing wisdom against what I believed was the violence of human society. So then, as if to celebrate, Leonie was getting up from the canvas chair where she sat, walking over to her bicycle where it leaned against a tree, and unclipping the tin from her packrack. She brought it back, prised off the tight lid, lifted back the wax paper and held it out to me. An offering. A reward for my good behaviour, for my listening and my lack of spite and also, as I would later learn, for the period of relative contentment I also represented for her.