Archipelago of Souls

by Gregory Day

  Her name was Sarah Murtagh, she was a year younger than I, and I lay adrift under the blankets at Wait-a-While, reflecting on what had happened.

  The rest of the afternoon fishing was marked by the distance I felt from her brothers and Vern as we continued dangling our handlines from the jetty. We hauled in the redfin and tench and I barely cared; back at home later that night I couldn’t sleep for the delicious thought of her there amongst the pebbles of the courtyard. My body had already burst from its cocoon some months before but now it was some other part of me altogether that had finally reached its potential. And that night I was ecstatic with my secret. Not because it was secret – it felt in a way as if the whole world knew or, better put, as if this new full brimming feeling was synonymous, indivisible from the world and everything else in it – but because I had been transformed, in that miraculous event that turns ugly pupae into sacred moths, gawky tadpoles into perfected frogs and slow-moving caterpillars into the full fluttering through the air of beautiful butterflies.

  But I had to roll over, there in the bed at Wait-a-While, and squeeze those sticky eyes shut in a grimace at the thought of what happened next.

  As the days of the summer went by, and we made further trips in our Dodge to Balintore, my feelings only grew. We would stay for cook-ups in the dusk on the lawn below the Murtagh’s covered front verandah and I confided in no-one. Well, Vern was too young and the others were her brothers, and besides, it was only to her that I had anything to say, only with her that the difficulty of words could be superseded. And one night, during one of those cook-ups on the lawn below the Murtaghs’ front verandah in which our dad was getting on famously with the Murtaghs and their friends with beers in hand by the fire, I managed to conjure a situation – or did she manage to? – where we ended up together, and alone, in that gloomy smithing shed with the enormous stitched bellows and the sharp smell of cordite.

  She had a dress with no sleeves and the dark skin of her limbs almost disappeared into the darkness of the shed. I don’t know how we began but we nuzzled like horses, my face in her hair, and the smell of it now overpowering the ammo, and then our lips were touching and our young teeth clicking against each other as we kissed. We knew it couldn’t last for long, they would wonder where we were, but I remember she was alternatively solemn and amused with what was happening and, as we emerged from the shed into the sound of cicadas, my feet hardly touched the ground. She was new, minted, and I was buzzing like a bee.

  Sorry to say, that was the only time we kissed, as whatever charitable instinct or pastoral inventiveness had brought our fathers together now seemed abruptly to scotch itself. The freshwater of Balintore and Lake Colac became another country again, suddenly the most unlikely destination for a family outing, and I was left to contemplate my options. I could ride over there and hover around the jetty in the guise of fishing and hope she’d see me, but it was more than likely her brothers would sight me first. But maybe they’d send me back to the house again, I thought, as the bucket filled and they grew hungry. I could take Vern along too, as a further decoy. At that stage, prior to his own emergence in puberty and before the negation of my own, he’d do anything I asked. But then of course I’d be responsible for him, we could hardly afford any more trauma after Mum, and I wouldn’t be able to slip away. No, I’d be better on my own.

  What I really couldn’t face, however, was sticking out like a sore thumb. Why would I all of a sudden be looking for tench and redfin on their jetty when I’d already bragged that summer about the fish to be had in my other favourite spots on the lake? I would stand out all right, in the full exposure and freshness of my innermost feelings.

  Compounding these difficulties though was the fact that I’d been making blues on the farm. I was my father’s son after all, set to head to boarding school that year but feeling also as if there was still time to show my father how big a mistake that was by showing him my suitability for the real tasks in life. Not books, not pushing a pen around some Lands Department office, not even as a gumbooted vet who’d make his rounds like some Inspector of Beasts. I wanted to fence, drench, dip, plough, slaughter, drove to market day, and understand the innards of all the newfangled machinery that was coming on. And now love, this dam-burst in my heart, this catching of my breath and gliding in my mind, was getting in the way. I put the tractor fuel in the Dodge for a start and was made to suck it back out through Mum’s flower hose. I turned the wrong way with the hardwood girder for the hayshed we were building and nearly beheaded Vern, and then, one night after haymaking, a storm had come in thick and sudden from out over Pirron Yallock. I was told to tarp the bales on the tray of the trap. We climbed up on top to get home quick but I’d tied it slack and the ropes got caught in the wheels and soon the whole show began to slip with the momentum toward the horses. My reflexes have always been quick but Dad got dragged forward and sent tumbling from his perch and was trampled. He was cut up amidst all the rain and the lightning and broke his collarbone, and all because I hadn’t tied the tarp properly. Since Mum had died he wouldn’t sleep in their bed and over the next few weeks his reluctant and cranky convalescence in our two-room sleep-out above the pines was confirmation enough that I was well destined for St Pats, Ballarat.

  I went to bed those nights in a welter of confusion, traumatised by events. Our mum had died, leaving Dad alone and Vern with a kind of immortal glow from having spent the last months of her illness sleeping in her bed with her, and now this. I began to flounder in my feelings and to form the notion that the richness of a life of love and beauty was a direct antagonist of the productive life we required on the farm. Because only I knew what was in my head when that girder had swung and nearly sent my little brother off to heaven to be with Mum. All my judgement, and what I considered my natural skill around the place, was now being frayed by the endless pros and cons of a bogus fishing trip to the Murtaghs’ jetty at Balintore. The delicacy of emotion that had been born as I came around their house side to the pebbled courtyard and saw her, was now convoluting, twisting in her absence. So I lay awake in the sleep-out, listening to Vern’s smooth breathing beside me, the ‘mopoke’ of the owl in the pines, and eventually made what I saw at the time as my fair dinkum manly decision.

  As I see it now, with the benefit of what I’ve been through and all that has been shown to me of the unjust gulfs between outer and inner worlds, worlds of pretence and substance, I clamped down on love and wrung my heart dry, like a rag from the laundry cupboard that has done the job and now the job is over. I tossed it into the corner and everything that went with it. I made my investment, right there as an earnest and sincere young boy-man in the sleep-out, I made my investment in doing ‘the right thing’.

  I would not chase down and quench the sweet fire that made me toss and turn with anticipated joy and kiss the pillow endlessly. I would not water the flower, I would disregard it like a worn piston-housing, like a dank splotch of wool or a stillborn collie, because that way we could get on with it, make a go of things around the lake, and not be distracted forever and a day by the click of kissing teeth in a strange smithing shed.

  And so it was I made no more mistakes that summer, none indeed of that nature forever after for the only mistake worth not making had already been made. Instead then of riding out in search of Sarah and love in the guise of tench, I knuckled down.

  It occurred to me behind those gunky eyes on the morning of the race day at Wait-a-While, that perhaps I had bequeathed all that to Vern. Not Sarah Murtagh herself but, yes, I left for boarding school, I took what was in fact his rightful place among the scholarly books, but more than that, I left a place behind for him. An untrodden space for a heart of beautiful things. And what I had to do with girls and women from that day on was sociable, fun, wisecracking, but nothing more, so that no wagon with me at the ropes would end up as a death trap on the slopes of love’s volcano ever again.

  With a heavy heart at the thought of
all this, I forced my eyes unstuck from the consequences of Sarah Murtagh. I got out of bed, washed my face at the sink. My eyes remained swollen but eventually the gunk across the lids and lashes was washed away. Before we went to the track, Brian was coming by mid-morning for a beer and they weren’t even on the ice.

  *

  By the time he showed up around eleven I was still in no mood for drinking and I told him so. ‘No reason for you not to open one though,’ I said, and, laughing at the sight of my swollen eyes, he agreed and told me I looked like a sunburnt blowfly.

  We sat at the table and, with a glass in hand, he admired my hut. He was all excited with the mood of the race day but was taking a kind of civic pause to admire the work of a man who he’d helped up onto his feet. He hadn’t been on the land since he’d sold it to me. We spoke of the expense of the Aga stove I’d had brought over on the boat, how it was worth every cent, just for the canny way you could control the heat in different parts of the thing with the effectiveness of the dampers and screw-vents. He shook his head in wonder, with the humble unknowing of a man for whom all meals were cooked by his wife. I could tell he was glad for me and felt in some way a sponsor of my domestic happiness. I didn’t want to wreck the cheery note so played along, singing the praises of not only the hut but the block as well. But when he nodded towards the ink bottle, pen and paper, over on the small table with the volume of Epictetus under the northern window, and said, ‘Young Lascelles mentioned you’d been writin’’, a tremor went through my veins.

  I pretended to ignore the remark at first, got up from my chair and suggested we go. I’d planned to boil an egg for Brian and serve it with some of the abalone I’d picked up the previous day because I knew he’d like such a feed on race day, but now I changed tack.

  ‘Hold on a minnie, Wes,’ he said, with broad amusement. ‘Let me finish my beer. There’s still plenty of time.’

  Brian Robinson was, in fact, so at home in his skin, and also within the second skin of his island, he was irrepressible. I miss him, even now. It was his customary manner that, in the most jocular of ways, he’d make it clear there was no way he’d do what he didn’t want to do. An enviable trait. And so, not knowing where to look now, and with sudden urgency in my blood, I turned back to the stove to boil that egg.

  Brian rattled on about this and that from his pew at the table but I could sense him peering at the back of my head, trying to work out what had got into me all of a sudden. But I knew he wouldn’t fathom too hard. There would come a point, perhaps only a turn or two down the track of his thoughts, where he’d surrender all speculations to the idea that my oddness of behaviour, and increasingly the abruptness of men in general, was all to do with the war. Which of course, in my case, that race day morning in the hut on Wait-a-While, was perfectly true.

  As the water was simmering so was my blood, at the thought of bloody Lascelles, with the sly discretion of a nosey postmaster, steaming open my packages and reading my accounts before re-sealing and delivering them to Leonie. It was his vocation to understand the hearts and minds of soldiers, so he could work tirelessly on their behalf to make sure everything was done and everything was available for them to enjoy a normal Australian life on their return. He would leave no stone unturned, no package unopened . . .

  And of course at his lookout in the PO he’d see all the to’s and fro’s. The way a letter is copperplated or enveloped, the nervous way it is posted, the promptness and tone of the reply. I was now convinced he’d seen me coming, that’s for sure.

  I could have written all the stuff that came after, my wild colonial heroisms when I finally saw beyond the search for justice and reason of those months immediately after I missed the boats. But I wasn’t writing for him, was I? I was writing because of him.

  At the thought of my tales of darkness, my sins, being broadcast all over the island, I could stand it no more. Turning my back on the egg and the bubbling water on the Aga, I held my palm out to silence Brian Robinson’s genial prattle, and said: ‘What exactly did John Lascelles say to you about my writing?’

  Brian was shocked of course, at being so pompously silenced, but then he grew po-faced at the request.

  ‘Ah, nothin’ too much. Just that you’d been sendin’ packages to Leonie Fermoy.’

  ‘Yair?’

  ‘Well yair, but only because we were talkin’ about Leonie and agreeing what a good sort she was. Given what she’s put up with.’

  ‘But how come you were talking about me? What have I got to do with what she’s bloody well put up with?’

  A cloud scudding west passed over Brian’s face. Just as quickly it was gone but he said: ‘Hang on a minute there, Wes. Bugger all was said about you, if you want to know.’

  ‘Yair, well what?’

  ‘Look fella, it’s not a crime to be keen on a lass. She’s not married or anythin’.’

  Poor old Brian Robinson, with this remark he really blew the lid off my fury.

  ‘Look here, mate! I don’t have any worries about that,’ I shouted.

  Brian’s mouth fell open at my volume and force. He couldn’t have known what that morning’s memory of the day years ago at Balintore had to do with the pitch of it. But I left him in no doubt anyway that he’d got his surmising wrong.

  ‘What I want to know,’ I went on, ‘is what that fucker Lascelles said about my writing.’

  Brian took a well-earned sip of his beer. ‘Well, as I say, bugger all. Only that Leonie’s been happy to receive the packages when he delivers them. And that she’d said they contained your “lovely writin”.’

  ‘That was all.’

  ‘Too right that was all. Lascelles himself said nothin’ about it, only what Leonie had reckoned to him. Which, I might say, he seemed happy about, on your behalf.’

  Turning back to the stove, I spooned out the egg. I’d burnt the toast so scraped the charcoal off into the sink, smeared it with butter, my mind still racing, then scalded the abalone with the water from the stovetop and presented it all to Brian on a cracked hospital plate.

  ‘By jingo! Magnificent, Wesley. You eatin’?’

  I managed a thin smile. ‘Maybe some toast and ab,’ I said, before turning away again.

  *

  We growled out of Wait-a-While in the Robinsons’ new truck, Brian marvelling continuously at how green everything was for the middle of summer. ‘Green as Lasithi,’ I heard myself saying, and as we crested the remainder of the hill I was suddenly describing the plateau where I lived in a cave with a certain Pommy officer with the codename Theseus, as if it had no qualms attached, no tragic aspect, just goodhearted peasants who knew how to best use the pastoral advantages of their altitude.

  Brian betrayed no surprise that I’d mentioned a moment from the war. His only comment was that he never knew Crete was an island of snow-capped mountains and green summer plateaus. Needless to say I didn’t go on to tell him it was also the original home of labyrinthine complications. ‘Yair, not many people here know about snow in the Med,’ was all I said in reply, wondering now at how the other island had snuck into my conversation at all.

  More pheasants than usual seemed to line the road as we bumped along, almost as if with their flourishing magenta and mustard markings they’d come out specially for race day. The air was fresh now and the sky woollen with cloud but the cabin of the truck was warm and smelt of molasses. Brian manhandled the long stick of the gearbox and asked no more questions. By the time we were veering south he was well and truly anticipating the meet.

  ‘Horses aren’t really my go, but it’s good for everyone, isn’t it, to kick off the year. A celebration of our own, around Christmas and that. Plus, it’s a lot more exciting than the euchre tournament.’

  We swung north then in a surprising loop, as if Brian was that content he just wanted to take in the scenery. Soon we were round the corner near my old haunt by the ten sheoaks.
I hadn’t passed that way for a while and looked across Brian out the driver’s side window.

  ‘Yair. That’s where you first propped, weren’t it?’ Brian said. ‘When you showed up.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Back on the Main Road to the track the festive pheasants had thinned out but the racegoers were thick on the ground. People were on foot, on bikes and horses, carts and tractors and cars; we even saw a motorbike and sidecar going by with the rest of the crowd streaming out of Currie. The pub had put on a Cup Day breakfast and no doubt they were all half-shickered already as they bumbled along. No sign of Leonie amongst them though. Not that I expected there to be. She’d told me at Uncle True’s, amongst other things, that she never ate breakfast.

  We parked the truck trackside, paid the entrance fee to John Lascelles’ father who was collecting the gate, received our programs, and strode into the affair.

  I was shy, and Brian knew it. I’d avoided all crowds since I’d arrived and straightaway was raising a few weather-flecked eyebrows with my blue suit, red tie, buttoned collar. They’d all been abreast of my movements, of course, and in their minds’ eyes at least, as they lay down at night, I’d become a fixture. From north at Wickham down to Stokes Point in the south their minds could reach out and touch each farm or house, each person on it. No one could escape, not even me. The crabby hermit soldier, or the seventh star of the Pleiades, rarely seen yet helping to define the other six.

  The words came to me, as I reeled from the conviviality of the knocked-up Turf Club crowd. They came amidst my flinching and prickling, and as the sweat poured into my shoes: