by Gregory Day
I stepped inside, fired up the stove, put the kettle on. Didn’t wait for it to boil though. I sat down at the table and inspected the wooden box. Printed on its flat lid, in faded lettering, were the words:
BINNEY BROS. STATIONERS
MURRAY STREET COLAC
For a start, a shiver went up my spine. The Binneys had run the newsagency in Colac since long before I was born.
I knew now where the box had come from. She was half Ondit, half whaleship. The Ondit half was the box. The whaleship half lay waiting under the lid.
Gently prising it off, I found inside the parcel I had sent through Lascelles, and beside that a small object wrapped in white muslin.
Lifting out my pages I could see they had been resting in the box, along with the muslin-wrapped object, on a bed of carefully arranged green tissue paper.
Holding the pages again in my hands it was immediately obvious that, at the very least, they had been looked at, and then loosely repackaged.
I placed them aside on the table, thinking the worst. Then, lifting out the object in the muslin – it was heavy in the hand – I folded back the cloth to find a cut-glass bottle of ink. At the bottom of the box lay a note.
Her handwriting is backhanded, as if each word is walking into a gale.
Dear Wesley,
When I was little at Yellow Rock my Pop showd me how to do this. He made his own from cuddlefish, for the scrimshore you see. So, happy memories for me, catching them at nite with the squidding lite, preparing the ink saks in the morning. Im glad to have a reasan to make some more.
I read what you sent me but wood hate for anything to happen to the pages here at Tucks.
Leonie
I sat stunned, bottle in one hand, her note in the other. Until the over-filled kettle started splurging hot water all over the top of the stove.
*
Just before midnight I thoroughly cleaned my old fountain pen and sat down to write. Such a churn of contrary emotions were now moving through me: honour, dishonour, anger, wisdom, belief in some possibility of warmth and dignity, and a total lack of regard. I pressed on regardless, committed now to bringing my shadows out into the world rather than letting them fester into dark and dampness.
With the first scratch of my nib on the paper I was propelled both forward and back. I suffered all over again, but this time wondering in dark brown cuddlefish ink whether or not every route we take, left or right, east or west, through bitter citrus or healing eucalyptus, will always, eventually, lead us to where we are ultimately destined to be.
XXII
I had no better friend in those days than Simmo the donkey. He’d travelled with me from back at the smoky cave with Perry Coghlan, through the hot days and cold nights with Spenser, hauling the wireless gear night after night up the steep climb to Karfi, and now beyond on a track of free choice, which I hoped would take us towards the south and the sea of caiques, but which looked likely to take us down a dead end to some macabre goat-fold full of like-minded corpses.
And I ask you this, how do human beings generally behave to such dear friends and companions as the donkey was to me? It was he, of all creatures, that had done me no wrong; he was at times niggly, at times blunt, but that only saw us well in harmony with each other, and it had even crossed my mind as I noticed him quietly biding his time in the narrow yard back at Marmaketo, patiently waiting and watching as my exalted status in the town turned sour, that he quite possibly was some higher, more loyal, incarnation of life. But a donkey is a donkey after all, especially to an Australian, who has little experience of them, and only knows of their status in life’s pecking order by how they compare to a horse. Yet I figured now that an inverse of that pecking order would be just the sort of irony the world would dish up. Yes, a donkey as confidant, as priest and loyal sage, its only flaw a stubbornness born from being so tragically misunderstood by slow-witted humans, who thought of themselves as its masters.
But three days and nights out from that fork in the road at Marmaketo, days and nights in which I had wound southwards but up onto increasingly steep and treeless terrain, where the temperature seemed to have halved and all the sustenance of plants had gone from the world, I was faced with yet another moment of difficult choosing, though this time the choice was not exactly free.
During those slow-going three days and nights I had faltered, doubted, taken a promising looking turn-off by an abandoned wayside monastery, doubted again, turned back, taken another wrong turn, and found once more the route I had chosen back at the fork. I’d been forewarned at Marmaketo that the way south could be difficult but, despite the view from the plateau of the towering cold grey slopes ahead, I had no way of knowing exactly what that meant. Eventually I had climbed upon Simmo’s back to ride higher and higher into the cold landscape of schist and shale.
Now, as the donkey plodded on up the steep rubbly gradient, the mad zone of the Marmaketo kaphenoi receded like a hospitable lowland behind me. We climbed even higher towards the chill crystal of an azure sky, so high in fact that I became dizzy on my perch, in part no doubt from worry and also my meagre provisions. With Bert’s words of warning about the difficulties of the mountains resounding in my ears, and still with insistent mental flashes of Vern tearing away from the dead German in the bloodstained oleanders beside Tassos’ villa, I had to climb down off Simmo’s back to walk on solid ground.
What about this island? I thought, with my feet slipping about on the shaley ground as we climbed on. Full of golden oil and fragrant airs one minute, human warmth and generosity the next, only to become as inscrutable, complicated and eerie as the moon. One day I’m surrounded by an invaded people chiacking in a well-stocked café, the next I’m struggling alone up a purgatorial scarp, where nothing nutritious seemed to have survived the great earthquake of 600 AD Spenser had told me about. My brain clanged against its casing. I expected to sniff the burning wings of Icarus at any moment, as nut by nut and cherry by orange I chewed through all my panniered food.
So it was that on the fourth consecutive day of directionless looping and climbing I once again backtracked from a turn I’d taken, reorienting myself and climbing again towards the southern sky, but still unsure of the route I was on. Hours later, Simmo and I stumbled into the rocky duct of what appeared to be a remote windmill site.
A wind of ice had been whistling about us in the previous hour of our ascent. I was worn out. I ducked into this roofless ruin and pulled a reluctant Simmo on his tether deep between the loosely masoned walls of the shelter, to save him also from that bastard of a wind. The gap of the stone wedgecut was barely fifteen feet wide but substantial enough to get us out of the worst of it. It had been haphazardly floored with timber planking many years ago and was now partially filled in by the large stone boulders of the collapsed windmill. Perhaps in some height of summer it was once inhabited, by a shepherd or some visionary klepht taking refuge from an encroaching world. It seemed barely possible in its present condition. I looked out from an uneven seat on the pile of rocks onto a remorseless hill-face over a canyon of air, where more white rock and funereal shale fell in streaks from the sky.
Simmo stood dead still in this closet, arse to the opening, eyes staring straight back into me as if he already knew what was coming. I understood why he didn’t want to shift his feet amongst the awkward angles of the rock clutter and old flooring, but nevertheless his stillness and stare were unnerving. As if all we had between us was a truth as bare as the mountain.
So I got up and tugged him so that he stood side to side across the open entrance, rather than facing me. And there he stood, my buttress to a world closing in, the knowledge in his eyes having already planted the seed of his own demise in my head.
After extensive rummaging and double-checking of my kit on the way up in the wind, I had verified that I was not only low on tucker, I was out. One last sliver of cooked marrow remained, a morsel the
size of two thumbnails, and with one eager slurp it was gone. With that swallow my plight sunk heavily upon me. I had barely eaten anything since the middle of the previous day, I’d rushed out of the plateau in a frustrated panic, refusing the dogged hospitalities, unprepared, with late autumn closing in towards winter. I had climbed a barren mountain with no exact knowledge of where I was going, and now from my seat in the wedgecut of the windmill I realised that, amongst his other criticisms of me, Manolis must have thought I had a death wish leaving the way I did. I huddled in on what felt like the edge of falling, with no food, no water, no mother or brother, and with more mountain still rising above.
Sometime in the next hour or so my body began to shake, my teeth to rattle. Our Baby may well have been at the bottom of the sea and I high on an alpine moonscape but as those minutes and hours went by our fates began to amount to pretty much the same thing in my mind. To be honest, I was terrified. There were no sharks to gouge me but an enormous black vulture was circling in silence over my head, as if, like Simmo, it knew what was coming next. I knew vultures preyed only on the dead and so I became further spooked by its presence. It was reading my mind.
Shaken, I prised out some worn and tired planks of the old mill structure and was able to make a fire to keep warm. And slowly, ever so slowly now, with an ache and gnaw in my guts, the night crept like the devil’s glove over the white hand of the world.
*
I lay awkwardly all night long, like something strewn upon the rocks, the cold whacking me each time I woke, ruining any relief from the nightmares. By the time the sun eventually rose I had a plan of action fixed in my mind. Sitting here now it seems half crazy but back then it could not be avoided: I could not continue without food.
There before me stood a carcass of meat. Occasionally it would blink or protrude its teeth, they were its only movements. It was the only living thing, apart from the vulture, among the cold boulders on that Mediterranean moon.
As a weakling sun inched higher above the jut of the windmill, I hoisted up my body, took out Spenser’s revolver, and shot Simmo.
I had aimed for the plate of hard skull bone just above his eyes but at the last minute he turned away, the bullet smashing into the base of his ear.
I heard his awful cry as he buckled forward amongst the awkward rocks, his foreleg making a sharp crack as it snapped when he fell. In high glare I watched him shudder and shudder again. Another bullet. Not stone dead, but then, soon enough.
My own shaking ceased, my soul was stunned. On that precipice of a morning I was the beast, as the donkey’s old muscles stiffened and a rectangular lake of dark blood pooled in a gap of limestone cubes at my feet.
*
We had a thing for butchers back in Colac, a thing for steak like butter, and how it got that way. There was the grass, of course, the lake air and breeding, but there was the craft, to be admired, of butchery. George ‘Rowdy’ Lee was the pick, a quiet bloke, with his well-dressed carcasses hanging expertly in Murray Street. No amount of small-town gossip or bluster or big-noting could ever dissuade my father that Rowdy Lee wasn’t a kind of genius. I remember him as pigeon-chested, small, with a silent confidence. Brief in conversation, occasionally he’d toss us kids cigarette cards, and if you caught him on the right morning you’d be treated from behind the counter-wire to an exhibition of flamboyance with the blade.
I was laughing, laughing black as the first war whores of Cairo, hacking into Simmo with Spenser’s fannie. I was thinking of Rowdy Lee, his Otway sawdust and shining plate glass, back on that other earth I had lost, as he honed his steels and looked out the window across Murray Street onto the war memorial. By contrast, I split the hide artlessly, gouging through corded sinew into the aged and marbled meat.
As I hacked away I could feel those eyes upon me. Black eyes, under hooded lids: expert, fierce and eternal.
When my belly was full – the roasted meat tasted in the end like a hessian sack, so coarse and hard to tear apart, I’m sure the vulture would have made a better job of it – I carved out a dozen or so chunks from the carcass, mostly by gouging at the hindquarters with the fannie, wrapped them singly in torn cloth from my spare Cretan shirt and stowed them away in my kit for the journey. I hear the ripping sound now as I tear the flesh away from the old hide. It’s almost identical to the tearing of the shirt. And I sit, to all intents and purposes ready to continue the climb, but fixed to the spot by a self-disdain deeply nurtured by exhaustion, isolation, redoubled grief, and the parched freeze of the air on speechless heights.
I sat by the fire unable to escape the eyes of the circling vulture or the slain donkey. Among the blood and stones, it came clear to me, with the philosophical energy afforded by the meal. The beast lying exposed across the angles of the boulders, cratered like the bombed groves around Iraklio, had fulfilled its duty and been repaid with a misfired shot and amateur butchery.
So it was, so I felt and do; and in that high ruin I attained a thorough complicity with the nature of the world, my own cold shale of treachery finally shedding a few drops of salt moisture down my cheeks, not for Vern this time, not even for Simmo who had carried me high to the realisation, but to what both of those deaths now symbolised: a random world without a god.
*
The turn of the mountain path, then its switchback into the opening of a valley and the downward pass when I came upon it barely an hour later, represented nothing to me other than my own shithouse lack of faith. So my one true and undivided mate had been butchered needlessly, by a weak man panicking at the top of a farm ladder, a man who’d lost his brother but who could have pushed himself further, pushed himself higher up the path and seen what now his eyes could see: across two small brown spines of land, a white village, waiting in its high fold at the end of a narrow vale.
Slowly, as I walked the three hours down the path through the easy ground, I threw each wrapped piece of Simmo’s flesh away from me, watching them thud or stick in the dried streambed to my right, or even roll to the butt of some stunted tamarisk or bush of thyme, plants that began to appear more profusely as I continued. I could not stomach that guilty meat if I didn’t need to. Now, in what was already a mental pile-up, I had the further image of the cratered beast – loyal mate – lying akimbo over the windmill’s rocky cubes, to add to all the rest.
I went along the valley and down, through an apple orchard on the slopes above the village, where I was noticed but not harassed by farmers painting the trunks of their trees. Still disguised in Cretan garb, my hair dyed and cut, I walked straight into the heart of the village, and managed to eat two apples from a tree on the way. I was no longer hungry, not even thirsty, but I did want to fill my water flasks before I headed out of the small tumble of lanes and on over what I hoped was only a two or three day distance to the coast.
After Marmaketo I was wary of being propped up again in the village kaphenoi like a trophy, but nevertheless I needed to know the whereabouts of water: a cistern, a well, or a spring. Eventually I was taken in hand by a widow who would brook no argument. As she ushered me like a chicken through her doorway, I thought that I might hit her – with one smart backhand bloody her tawny nose – to reject her hospitality, but knowing the Cretans as I was beginning to, I thought better of it. Just as I had been feted so fervently in Marmaketo, I could just as easily be shot as some fifth columnist in this town on the southern side of the range.
Inside her dwelling – low beamed, dim, smelling of dittany and the dirt floors, with some vast and dark-timbered loom taking pride of place in the one main room – I found to my shock a Kiwi soldier, a big Maori bloke, waist deep in a tin tub, his kit sitting neatly by the wall in the corner, on top of which a lucky-looking cat lay sleeping.
We were both caught by surprise but said g’day. And then the Maori simply proceeded with his washing, asking me questions from the tub, as if it was all in a day’s work.
I told
him nothing of what I’d been through, only that I’d come over the mountains through Lasithi and was on my way to Cairo to rejoin my unit. When the toothless widow had left us alone again, after bringing coffee and hard biscuits to the table, the Maori told me what the battle around Chania had been like and how, after sticking it to the Germans in one last ditch charge, he’d struck out with a mate from the evacuation at Sfakia where blokes were fighting each other to get on the boats. He and his mate had walked away in disgust to the east, figuring they could do better. They’d ended up being sheltered in a monastery at a place called Preveli, where they’d waited for many weeks for a boat until his mate got restless and convinced him to take up another offer from a Cretan who promised he could get them on a caique from a place named Tres Ekklesies. They’d left the monastery, but one evening while getting water from an apparently safe well as they travelled towards Tres Ekklesies, his mate had been captured by Germans. They’d been betrayed. He told me from the tub that he’d been on his own ever since.
Then he said in a whisper, in his strong Kiwi accent and with a flashing smile: ‘You’ve got to be careful, old mate, even with the locals, yeah. There’s some turned bad, some workin’ for Jerry. The old girl here told me it’s the Turk in ’em you see.’
He soaped his big body happily and said he’d been living with all the comforts in the little house for over a month. He was in no hurry to leave, he said, not with winter coming on.
In the state I was in the Maori’s good cheer was enough to turn my stomach. The Maoris were bloody natural fighters, make no mistake, but I could take no solace from the meeting. Swallowing hard, I asked where I could fill my water flasks and he gave me directions, saying he’d also leave the water in the tub for me to get in next. I nodded, as if this was how things would run, then quickly polished off the coffee and scrammed before the widow re-entered the room. I heard the big Maori calling from the tub as I went through the door but I wasn’t about to answer. I’d leave him to his soap and water and his cat-scented kit. I’d had enough of the widow’s hovel, even before I’d set foot in it.