by Gregory Day
‘So, Wesley, how are you settling in on the island?’ he asked. ‘Got everything you need?’
‘Yairs. Thanks.’
‘It’s a nice quiet place to come back to, eh. Where did you serve?’
‘Middle East. Greece. Crete.’
‘Yes, well. We got there in the end, eh.’
When I didn’t reply his eyes darted about like billy-o and he began rummaging in his pockets. Eventually he pulled out a packet of Minties.
‘Here, have one, Wes.’
‘No thanks.’
‘So, they tell me you bought some land over east. From Brian Robinson.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re plannin’ on staying put on King?’
‘I’ll see how I go.’
‘Look, Wes, I wish you all the best with it. There’ll be more blokes coming over in the months and years to come. With the settlement scheme and that. You’ve heard about the scheme have you, Wes?’
He knew bloody well I had. I didn’t answer, just stared at him. In actual fact I was trying to figure out why he was talking to me as if I was an invalid. Somewhere he’d got the idea I was to be tiptoed around.
‘Yes, well, there’ll be company anyway,’ he went on. ‘And assistance from the Agricultural Bank: fencing, a house, and to get some stock up and going. You’d be from a farming background, Wes?’
‘Yairs.’
‘You’ll know what you’re about then. Do you plan on taking the Settlement Board up on the offer, Wes?’
‘What offer?’
‘Well, the offer of some land, you know, some grass of your own to get you going again.’
‘You’re from King?’ I asked then, partly combative, mainly though to avoid the question he’d asked me.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact. My father came over to run the post office in ’37. I came to give him a hand. When my mother passed away.’
I nodded.
‘We used to run the PO in Sandringham, in Melbourne. Then, when Mum passed on Dad was so upset he wanted a change.’
‘I see.’
‘The island has its challenges, of course, but weather-wise it’s hardly Kokoda, eh, Wes. Or the desert.’
I said nothing.
‘Well, what I mean is, it’s in some ways quite similar to Melbourne in that respect. Just to the power-of, if you see what I mean.’
He spoke with a Pommy clip.
‘Whereas the jungle. That can be so unfamiliar. This is a picnic really, by comparison of course. You can always keep warm if you’ve got enough clothes. Cooling down’s a different matter. Not to mention the malaria.’
I wanted to ask him if he’d had malaria but didn’t. Then from the corner of my eye I spied Leonie parking her bike against the co-op wall.
Lascelles noticed my diverted gaze and turned to see what was there. Nothing much. Two wagtails sitting on the back of a horse outside the hotel, a tired old mutt loping across the road, a bike leaning up against the co-op wall. She’d disappeared inside.
Turning back to me, Lascelles said: ‘Well anyway, Wes, I’m in the PO most days with Dad if you ever want a chat. Perhaps you’d like to come over for tea one night at our place? We’re in digs behind the PO you know. We’re just up the hill there before the road turns to roll down to the harbour.’
Lascelles thrust out his hand, awkwardly. ‘Nice to meet you anyway, Wes,’ he said.
I nodded, with no camaraderie and no info, waiting for him to move off. Which he did, swivelling like a marionette to prod carefully back across the muddy slant of the road.
I wheeled my bike up the street and leant it against the co-op wall next to Leonie’s. I went inside. She was behind the low counter in her leather apron, checking off ration coupons. By the time she looked up I was standing right next to her.
She didn’t look pleased to see me, she didn’t look displeased either, she just looked. Then she said: ‘You’d be hot in that coat.’
I was still skin and bones, I s’pose, and found the overcoat handy on the bike. Cycling around King can get chilly. But she was right, it was a mild enough day outside. She herself was only wearing a white blouse under the leather apron, with no cardigan.
‘I’ve got a message for you,’ I said, inwardly triumphant at having an excuse to talk to her. This was not about me, my isolation, my harrow, nor was it anything to do with needing her company. It was a perfect ruse, and at the time even I believed it.
‘Uh-huh?’ she replied, flicking through the tickets on the counter in front of her, though slower than she had been.
‘I met your Uncle True on the beach,’ I told her.
‘What beach?’
‘Never mind. He said to tell you to go and visit him.’
‘You been up there at Yellow Rock, sniffin’ round those old days I told you about?’
She shouldn’t have said it. With my nerves already strung tight I was shocked, ashamed, the blood drained out of me. I turned and hurried out of the building, stomping in anger by the time I was passing out through the door.
I grabbed at my bike, knocking hers to the ground in my haste. Its guards clattered against the wall as it fell. Not stopping to pick it up, I tucked up my coat, wheeled my bike round to face downhill, and pedalled away.
I was fuming as I rode out along the aerodrome road. I hadn’t asked her to come and sit by my fire, I’d been quite all right with ten sheoaks for company. And I certainly hadn’t pried into any stories of her life. It was all her doin’. And now she’s on about it as if I’ve chatted her up. As if I’ve been the one, sniffin’ around like a fuckin’ bitzer. And every island galah will be given the same impression, every whacker like John Lascelles’ll be talkin’ about how I’m hangin’ around her spots. The pity will pour. For the soldier-shag alone on his lovelorn rock.
‘Bugger that!’ I fumed, as I turned right and headed southeast, clattering past my ten sheoaks roaring away on their Pat Malone. Off I went towards Wait-a-While.
XII
I stood in the dark on the headland near the sea that night of the evacuation, alone, amongst rocks beside the hulk of a charred Junkers fuselage. The world had changed, it seemed to tilt, until way out there in a flash of light on the water I saw an outline of a ship, akimbo, like a broken fence, going down.
Even now, amidst the bungalow walls and the light of this silver desk lamp there is another startling blaze in my mind and once again the ship is lit up briefly in my vision. It’s one of our destroyers, but where its decks should have been crammed with men leaving the island it is empty and still.
It was if everything had come to an end. Not only the battle but the war. Not only the war but the world itself. And now I am beginning to shake. My fingers can hardly hold the pen. In a last halo of acid light I hear the ship hissing water like a pained and dying beast. Flames dissolve and darkness surrounds me. Silence. I look behind but I cannot see The Charlies, let alone the wires we strung between them. I shut my eyes tight and in desperation reach for sounds out of the long ago, sounds to fill the silence. The notes of our mother’s piano, echoing from her bedroom as she willed herself from the death bed where little Vern lay beside her. Sweating in her dressing-gown she presses the music out of the keys, in an attempt to lift her spirit back towards life. I am outside, always outside that room, huddled on my own amongst skinks between the house and the lake, shivering from the notes ringing out, echoing through those farmhouse walls, until they travel beyond me and die out over the middle of the lake.
The sea becomes the lake. The ship falling into it. Images too, going down, pushing into the darkness. Screens of childhood, Vern and I, with rabbit nets and sacks of ducks, the week after Mum died, the morning our cubby was strewn over the lakeshore by vicious gales coming straight across from Pirron Yallock. The way we were not beaten, the next cubby we made, out of the rocks scattered
all around us, the cooled local lava, how we built it dry with Dad’s help at the shore end of the yard, having learnt from the weather now the right way to build in the place. To endure. I see little brother Vern, our Baby, crosslegged in shorts at the entrance, his tongue poked out the corner of his mouth in concentration, the smell of our mum still dying about him, as he’s plucking a plover I’d shanghaied.
Then I’m there again, alone and in shock on the headland. The sea is the sea, the ship on fire in my head.
You are so far from home, she said.
Eventually my eyes dropped from the sight of the flames, my head falling into my hands, which smelt not of our mum but of Adrasteia.
XIII
‘Wait-a-While’ is actually an old Bass Strait joke describing the way life on the islands moves only at the pace the weather and sea allow. No matter your expectations, your ambitions, or the head of steam you work up, everything out here gives way in the end to the gusting fronts and Antarctic gales ripping over the water, to sudden sand shoals and saw-tooth reefs. Well, true submission is often only learnt in tragic circumstances but, as it happens, my land had been given the moniker simply because of its awkward distance from the Robinsons’ farmhouse and sheds. It was that very distance from things – almost a feeling as much as a reality, it is a small island after all – that made it perfect for me. In actual fact, the north of the island is where the real distance is, the towns Currie and Grassy being south of its centre, leaving Cape Wickham, Egg Lagoon and Yambacoona isolated from the misinterpretations and lamingtons of town. That northern end was all Fermoy country in my mind now, and therefore not an option. It had even occurred to my suspicious mind that Leonie’s telling of her story, going right back to the days when Old Nat learnt the art of scrimshaw on the whalers, was just pure territorial. By telling me all that she’d successfully barred and contained me to the island’s more domesticated southern half.
My conclusion, from this distance at least, is that she chose to tell me what she did for practical reasons that had nothing to do with laying out her scent. The island does hold smells in glasswort gullies and behind hot dunes, but not like other places. The wind is a constant mail boat that comes to pick up that particular correspondence. We undergo a perpetual scouring, a scrubbing and washing. Eventually it wears away not only our scent but our flesh. We are wind-whittled. Human sticks in a shallow strait. Until, like Lascelles, they lower us into the ground, but even the soil that holds us will blow away eventually. When the sky truly will be scattered with an archipelago of souls.
Slowly, but surely, I built my hut, an L-shape of slabs, sticks and hessian in the U-shape of the clearing on Wait-a-While. There were three rooms: a bedroom in the proud southeast face of the ‘L’, the washroom and laundry behind it, and in the space horizontal to the view of the strait a living area fronted by a corrugated iron bullnose porch. I could sit in the shelter of this porch, with not only the rising mound behind protecting me from the westerlies but now the buffer of the hut as well. I could watch the sunrise over Naracoopa and the strait, and also the fronts passing over and into the east. I had two forty-four gallon drums for collecting water and planned for half-proper plumbing. And as I constructed all this around me, like the carapace of a slow-breathing ocean turtle, there were moments of mindless industrial contentment when it felt as if I might just about live as long as they do.
The closer the hut came to completion the less I relied on the people of the island. I’d had help from Brian, of course; from John Sanders down at Surprise Bay, who had the bullnose awning for the porch; from the blokes at Grassy Harbour who’d clued me in on shipping bits and pieces from the mainland, like the tap fittings, the mantle and the windows (there seemed to be no glass anywhere on King, no windows stacked away in sheds or down the sides of houses, it was as if as soon as its usefulness had expired any glass would spontaneously smash in the westerlies); but now as my construction tasks diminished, once again I saw less and less people.
So this was when the coals really started to be raked over. During those long solitary nights at my dining table (a fair slab of macrocarpa pine sitting on two kero boxes), beside the Tilley lamp, my brown teapot repeatedly cooling, the crumbs of the Cretan bread I’d baked sitting on a chipped yellow plate, I began to reflect on the spell that had been cast. Not just on Vern or me but on us all. Krauts and Eyeties and Allies alike.
I was smoking fifteen to the dozen as I nutted this all out at Wait-a-While and tried to focus on the monster in the labyrinth. Did the Germans know what would happen, knowing Crete historically so well? Did they wait on purpose before sending the Junkers and the paratroopers in, to allow us recovering diggers time to be seduced by the dancing light? How many others amongst us, like Vern and myself, like Mug and Ken, found themselves transfigured during those days of waiting in May? How many others fell headlong into that ancient Mediterranean chimera at the heart of the war? Hundreds? Thousands even?
It was during this period, this intense period of my first real stillness on King – a stillness whose underneath was roiling like a creek in deluge – that there was a knock on my door.
I opened it to find her standing with her back to me, looking out from the high crown, over the straggly messmates below to the sea. She didn’t turn around at first, something out there had caught her eye. I looked at her back, the dark brown suede coat, her long thick hair even paler than usual, white as beach bone in fact and wrought in a bleached knot at her shoulders.
I looked over her to the sea. A green crayboat with white trim was beating south for Grassy. I looked back again at the complications of her hair, the weave and wickerwork of her, as she stood not saying hello, not even turning around.
It was not only the first I’d seen of her since clattering out of the co-op enraged, but her first visit to my hard-won hut. And suddenly I wanted to step forward, out of what I had built, and to put my arms around her in the clean openness of the air. But I knew it would bring the pain out with me. I felt that. I would sob at the very touch, I would collapse and be gone.
‘See, that’s the Abernethys comin’ in,’ she said, her long finger pointing out over the water.
And then, finally, turning to look at me. ‘Uncle True went as decky. Been three weeks. He’s made it back.’
With sky behind, her face was clearly delineated. All around her left eye was storm blue bruising and welt. She could still open it but the lids and brow were swollen, gleaming with the stretching of the skin.
I said nothing, just stood to one side of the doorway for her to walk in.
She said nothing either. She entered, and I nervously fumbled for the handle to close the door.
The day shut out, she stood in the middle of the room, with her back to me again.
‘This is nice,’ she said. ‘Better than the camp.’
I paused, adjusting.
She turned for the second time, the eye not quite as dramatic in the second light, but still undoubtedly there.
The knuckles of her left hand resting on the bare wood of my table. She stared at me. I realised. She was trusting me. Trusting me to see, and not to ask. But why?
I felt a pressure then, behind my temples, the memory of a natural shelter, the whisper of ten sheoaks, and wished I was back beside them.
I stepped away from the closed front door and around the table to my kitchen sink. She pivoted, slowly on her resting knuckle, to watch me as I went.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I asked, touching the hob of the wood heater with my fingers to test its heat. ‘I’ve got a proper pot now.’
The brown teapot sat in the centre of the table. Not far from her hand. She nodded slowly, but in a satisfied kind of way. Around her eye socket there was the faintest tint of egg-yolk yellow, the bruising was beginning to come out. The wound was two or three days old.
Fishing around in the sink I lifted out an abalone shell, gave it a wipe wi
th a rag, and brought it over to the table. I knew she’d want to smoke.
‘Take a seat,’ I said. ‘I’ve baked some bread. Greek style.’
She pulled back one of Brian Robinson’s bentwoods and sat. The chairs had once been brown but I had sanded them. There was still the odd fleck though and I saw the recognition in her face.
She began to roll her smoke. The paper tinkled where it hung from her lip. She really was a sorry sight.
Under the window on the northern wall of the room I had set up a second smaller table with a piece of green baize, a squat vase which I kept fresh with white correa, wattle, daffodils or dandelions, and Vern’s volume of Epictetus, which I’d found could well temper any mythologising I was inclined to. Not to mention the wallowing.
Leonie now nodded towards this table under the window and commented on the flowers. ‘You read much?’
I took the teapot from the table and headed for the door. ‘I s’pose,’ I said as I went. ‘Well, I did, early on during the war.’
I opened the door with relief. The light was welcome, its possibilities endless. Stepping out from under the porch I threw the leaves over the ground I’d cleared. I watched, as always now, to see what kind of mark they made.
I returned, closing the door behind me. She’d finished rolling her smoke and was now rolling mine. She saw me notice. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked.
‘No, go for your life,’ I said, in as blithe a voice as she would so far have heard from me.