Archipelago of Souls

by Gregory Day

  So why not, I thought, in the fresh cast of mind brought on by climbing out of my kit, why not distract myself by concocting a legend to entertain poor Perry, the story of the sultry nymph who derailed so delectably my campaign? As Perry toyed with the sticks of oak in the fire I was just about ready to cheer him up with the tale. Ready to unravel my boast, as if we were at some cricket club turn with an eighteen and a niner. But when I looked up from my smoke and peered at him more closely – the way he was quietly, almost studiously, arranging the sticks and examining the flames – I thought better of it.

  He was about my age, Perry, but he looked barely seventeen with his freckles and his pale skin. I could see that even without the shock he’d endured he’d be a worrier. He’d cried on the beach, of course, and I’d guided him back to the villa without word or question when the tears had stopped. We’d shared something then, and now we shared this. So, arranging myself so that I was lying on the ground beside the fire, my head on my kit and my face looking up through the gap between holly oak fronds to the sky, I began, in order take his mind off things as much as anything else, to tell him the less hair-raising story of how Vern and I, Victorian brothers from a farm near Colac, came to find ourselves enlisted in the New South Wales battalion of the 2/4th.

  I reckon I began with something like: ‘Yair, so it’s funny the way things work out anyway, eh Perry. Take my brother Vern, for instance. Growing up the last thing you’d think was that he’d shine as a soldier. Least of all with a whole bunch of nongs from north of the Murray. He was windy of guns as a kid, you see, got it in his head to turn vegetarian when he was thirteen, shirked the hardest work, hated fencing, always hard to get up of a morning for milking. Drove my old man mad with what he wouldn’t do. “Bloody Vern. Where’s bloody Baby?” the old bloke’d always be shoutin’. We called him Baby, you see. Whereas me, well, I s’pose the old man always kind of took it for granted that I’d turn out all right. He could see the country round the lake suited me fine. When I went off to boarding school Dad was worried about how he’d cope, so he kept Vern back to give him a hand. And he’s not what you’d call the greatest encourager, the old man, it’s not like he would have shepherded our Baby along at all. I’d come home for holidays and Dad’d expect me to be straight into it, to make up for lost time. We’d be cutting hay on the slopes down near the pines on the lakeshore, or picking the scoria off the paddocks he leased at Cundare, and he’d be paying out on Vern for my benefit. It wasn’t as if Vern wasn’t capable, he could ride a horse like Captain bloody Moonlight for Christ’s sake, but only to go look at a field of groundsel or round to Vaughan Island to spy on the pelican nests; or he’d gallop to the top of Red Rock for the view, you know what I mean. Anyway, I was the one as far as the farm was concerned, Baby was headed for the priesthood, Dad reckoned, which scared the life out of the old man who’d only become a Mick for Mum’s sake. Yairs, it was the seminary for Vern, either that or he’d go school teaching like Mum, and Dad didn’t like that idea either. That’s one of the reasons why he never let him follow me to boarding school. Kept him back, to make a man of him, he said, though it was all caught up with Mum I reckon. Her passing away. Anyway, it’s bloody unusual the way it’s turned out.’

  ‘How do ya mean, bloody unusual?’ Perry asked.

  ‘Well, I just wouldn’t have picked him to stand out like he did with his relish for the blue here the last couple of weeks. Never showed any real sign of it beforehand. Not up on the mainland at Vevi. I mean, he was there, and more chuffed than any of us to be in Greece, he survived the arse-whipping like we all did, if we were lucky, hey, but aside from his nous with the lingo and history, stuff he’d taught himself back on the farm, he was just another footslogger like us, you know.’

  My thoughts were beginning to stretch out and it was a relief in a way just to talk after the days of screaming planes. Beside me though Perry was still pent-up, and the more I spoke, the worse he seemed to get.

  Perhaps infected by his mood I soon too went silent for a time. I upturned a tin of bully beef into the pot and had the depressing thought then as I stirred the tucker that we had only to collect our thoughts and energy here before setting out sooner or later for the next cock-up of the war. And with that a shiver went through me and, dishing out the sludgy beef in the mouth of the cave, I tried to brighten up, hoping to stop myself, and Perry, from stewing any further.

  I circled back to the yarn, about how Vern and I had ended up as the only Victorians in a New South battalion. I told him how a few years after our mum had died our Uncle Den had Vern and I sent to Dad’s sister’s in Manly in Sydney, to give the old man a break. It was ’39 by this stage, and if anything, with Vern fully grown, Dad was getting worse. Aunty May’s was a godsend for Baby. With her husband Jack she ran a big hotel, the Ivanhoe, on the Corso. Vern felt finally free of the clutches and enjoyed helping out and chatting to all kinds in the bar. With his gift of the gab and good looks he became very popular too with the clientele. We’d been there three months, our time was nearly up and he was dreading coming home, when the war broke out. Aunty May said we should go see Dad first but Baby wouldn’t hear of it and we wrote the old man a letter. It was Uncle Den who wrote back saying Dad was all right with our decision. Tim Mangan from Ondit was helping him on the farm and she’d be right. We took the ferry straight into town, then the train straight out to Ingleburn, and joined the 2/4th. As I joked to Perry, we’d never heard the end of it since. We were always copping guff about being the only Vics in the unit.

  Pretty soon though these tales of Vern and I petered out like the fire. Perry and I settled back into a silent, smoky companionship. If you could call it that. He obviously didn’t want to speak and I wasn’t about to pester him. We sat around all day listening to the mozzie-whine of the far-off Stukas, and the barking of village dogs, and around dusk I pushed my way through the oaks on the outcrop in front of the entrance to peer out over the swale of olive lines below, the parched and stony folds towards Mount Juktas.

  There were not many signs of life. A distant figure, tiny down there in a stooped black suit and black cap, walking a pack-donkey on a narrow winding path. A small huddle of goats, their bells clonking, browsing at a lower slope of Juktas. A black hawk out in the air in between, pumping his wings like mad for the hover, getting itself right to attack the reptiles on the roasted ground below.

  I pushed back through spiny bushes to find Perry had moved further into the cool gloom of the cave. He was lying on his back in his swag, his eyes open, staring at the coagulate of rock overhead. He was wound up tight all right, and I wished he’d snap out of it, just for the company.

  After another pretty lousy attempt at conversation, this time about the pros and cons of Aussie Rules versus rugby, I decided to leave Perry to his own devices. A couple of hours before nightfall I fished Zane Grey and also my army diary out of my kit. I wrote and read into the darkness.

  Eating oranges again after dark, and olives, and also some more of the rock-hard bread. Perry says he still isn’t hungry, we don’t want to light much of a fire because of the smoke, and so we set fire to a few small sticks and he drinks hot water and choofs on the German Korfu Rot we found in the sack from Costas. With no conversation forthcoming I move in right over the tiny fire so as to read by the warmth and for a time lose myself among the mesas of the Yukon. Perry sits not six feet away, but it may as well be eight miles. He smokes and mulls things over, is always polite if I ask him something but is as distant as the man I saw walking with his donkey far below our cave during the last heat of the day.

  I turned in first that night, leaving Perry to the flux of smoke, the inner heat and outer chill. When I woke next morning he was back out in the mouth of the cave again, but standing not sitting, with his back to the fire pit and a ciggy on his lips. I sang out to inquire if he had been to bed. He turned to face me and said he had slept, but woke early and thought about re-jigging the fire. But he s
aid he heard Stukas in the distance and saw three in the sky far off towards Iraklio. In a worn-out voice then he called them ‘evil bastards’ and ‘dogged arseholes’, ‘ruthless cunts’, and said they were probably bombing all the poor bastards who Tassos had told us were headed south through the western mountains to Sfakia. Which would be against the Geneva Convention, he said, ‘but that’s all useless now anyway’.

  I was just happy he was talking, though he looked drained and his voice was as thin as a reed. Rolling over in my swag, I tried to visualise Adrasteia but felt sick at the attempt. A rat was crawling through my stomach. I saw instead the flash again of a ship going down in flames. That weird moment of telepathy, which haunts me even now. Pure contagion of the war.

  *

  Sometime around the middle of the day I’d knocked off the western and, like a dissolute child, was annoyingly bored. I remember I began to nag Perry for not eating. Once again he was terribly polite. I wasn’t picking up the signs. Then I turned to chastising the darn fleas, the blisters on my feet, then to assembling a woodpile for the days ahead, and eventually to writing letters home. I told Dad about our Baby’s magnificence in the battle and how it was stupid me who’d missed the evacuation and was stuck here on the island with a bloke from Tumut who had a touch of shellshock. I asked Dad questions about the farm, about the lambs and the pigs, the water levels in the lake and the stock prices at Colac, questions whose answers I knew would be well redundant by the time any reply he composed ever found me. But I had to ask these things, didn’t I? As if I was just up the Beeac road a way doing some milking.

  All the writing got me going though and by dinnertime – oranges, olives and dried bread from Costas’ sack – I was regaling Perry with further tales from the lake, whether he liked it or not.

  He never told me to shut up but it would have been torture for him: my descriptions of Mum’s long illness, of how Vern shared the bed with her for the whole last year, about how she died on his birthday, and how later on some poems he wrote got him the scholarship to Geelong and how it caused such a row coz Dad wouldn’t let him go, and how in lieu of school he was always running those poems by me on the holidays as if I cared, which I did but not perhaps as much as he imagined. I considered myself to be keen on everything actually: the farm, sport, poetry and fishing included. But Vern’s idea of everything wasn’t so thinly spread as mine, his was like deep soil in a narrow paddock, and it didn’t include all the rocks around the place that Dad needed a hand with while I was away at school.

  Whether he wanted to hear it or not (and I hate to think now of how it must have tormented him) I told Perry how unnerving it was the way the old man kept Vern back, trying to teach him how to build a decent drystone wall and making him ride his mare into Colac to school rather than take up the carrot in Geelong. Perhaps he figured it was now or never to straighten Baby out and give him some of the fundamental nous of how to work with his hands. But, of course, there was more to it. I’d come home on the winter holidays and there Vern’d be, the scholar in exile, sitting by the ferret cages reading Lord Byron or some such. He never held it against me but he’d roll his eyes at the mere mention of the old man. We’d spend the holidays plugging walls or drenching sheep and I’d get to pick his brain. He’d recite a list in the sleep-out, the books for me to bring home when I came again. We got on better the longer this stupid arse-about arrangement went on, even despite how my mind was emptier than his, or at least more on the land and the quality of grass, not as insightful or bright as his was. I always felt protective of Baby and I can say now I loved him dearly. Since Mum had gone even more so. And I knew that if I was him I wouldn’t have handled it. Being kept on the farm like it was a prison. I would have taken off years before we were sent up to Aunty May’s in Manly.

  Perry just listened as I rabbited on. I was sensing something drastic was amiss but I fought hard to quash my inklings with the old memories. The sun went down behind Mount Juktas.

  I got him nibbling on some dried bread that night but nothing more and after a while it was clear once again that he’d prefer it if I shut up. I considered broaching the subject of his dive from the Imperial, in order to bring him out of himself, but something deep within me didn’t want to know. The scuttled ship, now lying on the bottom of the sea, felt like a no-go zone. So I lent him the Zane Grey by way of a gesture and dug out my army diary again for myself.

  *

  When I woke the next morning to see Perry hunched in his usual position by the fire I was relieved that Costas was expected with supplies that day. He’d have news, something to tick things along. A few more days of Perry Coghlan’s mood and I’d go screwy.

  Once again the sky was cloudless and, as I say, Perry was locked down in his own cogitations. Both of us had fleas but he started to scratch at a spot on his left forearm a lot, and to flinch nervously for no apparent reason, and he had a mad dog look about him.

  As it turned out no one from the village showed on that day. We had water from the trickle at the back of the cave and food to see us through if we weren’t so free with it, but it was slim pickings: olives, walnuts, oranges, dried bread, we’d polished off all the M&V rations, and as the day wore on with a heavy heat I hadn’t ruled out the possibility of trying to shoot a bird. But when I ran this idea past my distressed mate he fired up and made me promise I wouldn’t, in case anyone heard the shots and came to flush us out. When I tried to protest that the ridge was safe and that a bit of roast pigeon or partridge would hit the spot, he panicked, saying we couldn’t be sure now where the enemy were and exactly who they were in pursuit of. In the cold light of looking back, this seems fair enough, far more sensible than firing a shot into all that silence; but the way it was dished up to me, with Perry pulling at his curls and his eyes bulging like a possum’s, I didn’t want to see my way clear to the sense of it. I s’pose this is how mistakes happen, how madness creates more madness. Sooner or later, trauma becomes an infection circulating in the air, affecting everyone in reach.

  Perry remained by the fire throughout the day; we had to keep it at a low smoulder on account of the smoke, so he just sat prodding, toying with it, dragging on the Korfu Rot, and scratching away at his arm. By late morning, though, he started berating the scenes in his head with frenetic whispers. Around the middle of the day, after the sound of German planes through the morning, a surprisingly thick woollen cloud stretched out over our outcrop and Mount Juktas, making the day uncomfortably close and sweaty. I asked Perry if he would please knock it off.

  ‘Just relax would ya, mate. You’re off the boat and you ought to take the time to freshen up for whatever’s comin’ next.’

  He gave me a cowering look, rubbing his stubby little nose vigorously with the heel of his hand. ‘Yair, sorry, Wes. Forgive me.’

  Well, there ya go, I remember thinking, that wasn’t too hard; but within a few minutes it was clear I was no miracle worker after all. Once again he hunched low over the fire pit, his back to the cloudy world above the bushes behind, his eyes boring straight into the mouth of the earth as if he’d not only seen a ghost but decided he might become one.

  I couldn’t take the ragged edge anymore. Walking over to my kit, I picked up my rifle, detached the bayonet, and began to give the barrel a wipe down. I could feel Perry’s eyes on me as I jacked the carriage open and began to load it so as to go and find a bird.

  I lay the Enfield down against the boulder in the centre of the cave and took my flask over to the trickle. As the water slowly filled the flask I watched Perry in the gloom. He was staring at my gun where it leaned against the boulder. He didn’t take his eyes off it and suddenly it felt as if we were hurtling at a hundred miles an hour into danger. I stoppered the flask not even two-thirds full and strode purposefully back and picked up the carbine. I held it across my chest and planted my two feet into the earth.

  Perry turned his head away like a kelpie who’d been kicked. I moved o
ut of the shadows and said I was going to get us some dinner and that by the time I got back I wanted him to have snapped out of it.

  *

  Out in the clear, I stopped to catch my breath and calm myself down. The air was humid and I headed to a higher part of the ridge above the cave that was just a further tangle of sharp stones, wild thyme and prickly holly oaks. Was I going mad or had I really just dodged a bullet?

  Roaming the ridge for quite a while I began to enjoy the stretch, and even the sweating under the close cloudy sky. I was careful to stay away from any obvious kalderini – that’s what they called their old drystone paths – leading back in the direction of the village. Perry might have been terrified of the consequences of me firing the gun but I was more concerned with bumping into a Kraut on the track. Plus, Tassos’ orders held sway over me still, in a way no CO had ever managed since I’d joined up.

  After what must have been a good couple of hours of combing that spiky ridge for edible birds and finding none, the day seemed heavy to me again, and deathly quiet too, as if anything capable of sound or call had been silenced by the humidity. I began to make my way back through the thick perfumes of the scrub to the outcrop and the cave, but as I followed my own footsteps back, down the loose scree of the slope past the branches I’d broken as I’d gone out – a form of blazing which ensured I’d find my way back – I met Perry scrambling up the slope towards me.

  Despite his emaciated state he was sweating like a fat man in only his singlet, his shoulders pink to the heat of the day, his dog tags jumping round against his pale hairless chest like two mice in a maze.