by Gregory Day
*
Later on in the evening light I rode in the tray of the Robinsons’ Dodge as it gurgled slowly across the middle of the island, down the paperbark chutes of the road back east. In the cabin they were shoved in four abreast: Brian at the wheel, Annie next to him, portly Rose beside her slim sister, and Leonie on the other side. Three of them drunk and perfectly happy with the day’s events. The other a little worried on at least a couple of counts.
The plan was for them to drop me off first at Wait-a-While and then to roll the truck down into Naracoopa where they’d turn north and take Leonie most of the way home. As the truck bumped along I thought about an alternative to this plan. Was she wondering about it too? After all it would save the merry driver the added journey. If they didn’t have to go up north they would get home before dark, which was a good idea given the truck had only one headlight working. But there was no way of being discreet.
Stymied, I leant back against a bag of spuds and watched the colours of the browsing pheasants on the roadside recede before me in the Cup Day dusk. As we rumbled along I saw the blocks of cows, the up-tailed turkeys, even caught sight of the Currie–Naracoopa telephone wire from time to time, strung and hooped from tree to tree, wound round the top branches, its long irregular loops crossing the island like some continuous airborne script.
Funny thing was, in considering the possibilities I’d neglected the most obvious one. To be indiscreet. The truck crested and rounded the curve approaching my turn-off, and Brian ground down through the gears till we came to a halt under a panel-slapping profusion of mirror bush. The island etiquette had won me over. I jumped down from the tray and looked in through the open driver’s window to say goodbye.
Yes, I agreed, a great day was had. No, I concurred, I couldn’t believe that True Fermoy could be that tinny. And thank you, I said, as Rose handed over a bundle of leftover scones wrapped in a One in–All in tea towel.
‘Cheerio, then,’ I said, ‘bye for now, and thanks.’ Whilst trying too hard not to look. Brian shoved the big old gearstick into position and gave me a smile. I watched in a painful grimace, but waving, as they bluesmoked back onto the road.
Just before they descended over the crest to leave the sky and begin the roll down to Naracoopa I saw a movement. The drunken wheels ceased to roll, a black oblong flung out from the side of the truck, and she stepped out onto the road.
She straightened her clothes, dusting herself down, as the truck moved slowly away. Then one red brake light appeared on the verge of the long descent. She heard the engine temper, turned towards it, and then waved it on. The Dodge remained at a standstill. All currents of the island seemed to pause. Then finally the gears ground again in the clear acoustic of evening and the Robinsons began to disappear over the hill.
Four
Catch Me Alive
XXVIII
When I left Agio Dormiton that morning I could see the criss-crossing options laid out, the pale clay paths ribboning the slopes of the descent in front of me. But strangely, I felt I couldn’t miss. The lie of the land, my course to the south, like everything else in the amoral universe, seemed suddenly very simple. One path might be more exposed than the other but in the end how was I to know? The very nature of the sweat coming through my pores seemed already transformed by the pulling of the trigger. I no longer stank with fear. I was no longer unhinged by shock.
As I set off down the slope I did not care anymore for a reckoning of sources. In the end nothing was proved by where you were from, what your name was, nor what you claimed your cause to be: an Orthodox monk meditating on the death of Christ’s mother; a British archaeologist finding wisdom in an ancient shard; an Aussie digger calling a spade a spade. Not to mention an RN admiral running a tight ship in defence of the free world. Even the dead virgin herself, with her unconditional compassion, was someone I might meet on the road.
I wore remnants of at least three uniforms: pallikari bog-catchers, an Englishman’s car-coat, my dog tags hidden in the hair of my chest. But they couldn’t claim me now. Not even as some kind of unofficial Australian mongrel. The motley garb was more than emblematic and I was beyond it all, with only the sea ahead of me. I had travelled inward and far.
By lunchtime, with the travel all downhill and winding forever across the spiny slopes, and hairpinning down through country parched from the sun reflecting off the far sheet of saltwater and belted dry by the Libyan sea winds, and all alone with not even a goat by the roadside and no vultures in the sky, I got to rummaging quite differently through my condition. Perhaps I was simply refreshed by the reflections brought on by finally walking again after the long period of stillness. Either way, it was as I came traipsing down the zigzagging track, with orange rocks on my high side and the dramatic cut of the Arvi gorge looming against the sea and sky below, that I arrived at an unexpected and liberating notion.
When our mum was dying, it was Vern who was bundled up beside her in the bed. I understood now how that saved him from being boiled down to just another wiry countryman. In the mornings he and I would walk the track round the lakeshore to the school, our pockets stuffed with knucklebones and slingshots, as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on, as if our house hadn’t become like a hole in the daylight. But I could smell her on him even out there in all that air. He carried her with him wherever he went. We’d return after school, do our jobs under Dad’s instructions, and after tea the situation would deepen. I’d be allowed to sit on her bed and chat about the day. But every night through that long year it was the same. Baby’s bedtime would come, I’d get a loving kiss on the cheek and have to leave her. I’d go blinking into the light of the kitchen and he would disappear through the door I’d emerged from. Leaving me alone, with Dad and the smell of lamb’s fry on the stove.
Sometimes she’d heft herself up out of the blankets and I’d hear her going over to the piano. I’d duck outside, around through the laundry and listen breathless from out under the verandah, estranged from the thick interior of her dying, listening not so much to the notes she played – those surging runs from the airs of Moore she loved so much – but to the high aether of the notes, the echoes ringing in the painted eaves of the dark room. At the touch of the soft hammers on the strings I saw stars ignite in the night sky. Those high sounds became proof of another existence to me; it was nothing that you could write on paper but without the echoes the air would have been strung tight, clipped as a train ticket. This was my mother in the music, this was her solution to the unsolvable mystery: her slow death in our growing lives.
Gradually through that year she became more echo than music, her body thinning amongst the fug of the sheets and eventually tapering like the light effects on the lake at dusk.
This is what Vern had absorbed in the bed. Her wishing him close was his real education. The poems he got interested in after she was gone: the Brooke, the Byron, the John Shaw Neilson, were his stars in the eaves. And even more telling was the womanly sweat of her armpits, her whispering, the smell of iodine on the blankets, the liquid music of her bedpan in the cold hours of the night, the old Tipperary mottoes she mumbled as together they awoke, the mother and child, at dawn by the lake.
This is what I had mistakenly thought it was my duty to deny. That real power manifests not in the note but in the echo, in the presence of death in the room of life, in the spirit of a woman staying alive in the growing identity of a boy.
This was Vern’s fullness, what gave him his fearlessness. What sent him up onto those broken rafters of Iraklio on the night of the evacuation.
Our mother’s truth. As the precious sky above our lake was torn apart and opened. And she ascended into heaven. This is why I felt left behind.
*
There were no villages on the dusty road I’d taken, no kaphenois, not even a roadside shrine. I was glad I’d had the presence of mind to take the food from Agio Dormiton. Eventually I clambered up a small
cutting off the road, sat under a rare shady tree and ate. I scanned the sky through the branches, slurped on the messy juice of a marrow and kept an ear out for engines or warning sounds on the track below.
It was the absence of anything but blueness overhead and the utter silence of those deserted slopes that I remember most. Even through the mozzled shade of the tree the sun was warm and though the slope itself was scrabbly and harsh, with each passing minute I could feel my muscles thawing and the tissues of my flesh softening.
We had no need to ask where our mother’s knowledge and beauty came from, she was always telling us: the cool black soil, the lava crumble, the loamy guzzles and dry rises of stone and bracken, the plains of fescue and turkey bustards round the lakes. In the sagging iron bed, as Vern had imbibed her tales and absorbed the pictures, I’d felt locked out in a streaky place resembling the lake when the water dried up. Marooned, with Dad’s dudgeon. Poor Dad. The bastard. He stalled, he wouldn’t cry, and expected me to be the same. In the end I reckon he was only half human from trying so hard. Shrill as fence-wire in a northerly. Then silent as the volcano. I lay back under the tree and sighed a thawing sigh.
Later that day, on the winding downward march, Ken Callinan came into my head. The Ken we knew before his face fell half off. He was the salt in the soup, Ken Cal, such a good bloke to have around. He stood square on the ground, the duty came natural to him, he had no trouble walking in the nation’s shoes, had no desire to be anyone else, any better or worse. Or so it seemed. But in that courtyard, under the moist sponge in Adrasteia’s hand, I remember the moment. When his struggle to speak, his need to stem the flow of blood with words and my attempts to keep the parts of his face and head together so that he could do so, so that he could live and be heard, was superseded. His eyes began to stare as if at some puzzle back inside himself, a puzzle resolving. Was he listening to the music? Seeing stars come to life in the eaves?
We leant in close to him and there were no longer ranks or reveille, no definitions of Private Kenneth Callinan. We felt it, Adrasteia and I, this thing beyond names, and what’s stranger is we knew it well too, as if beforehand.
And then he was gone. Ken Cal. And after one of those deep and holy pauses that if you’re lucky follows death, the horns of Jericho started screaming again, our hands went to our ears, time and the battle carried us on. Now on the road above Arvi I knew that that was what was worth telling, the only thing I could tell Ken’s dad about, what I’d recount to his mother and sisters too, on the mint settee in Newcastle. If only I could find the words. For how he came into his fullness.
*
By dusk I’d noticed the brush of the mountainous slopes giving way to olive groves again and reckoned by this alone that, despite the zigzags, I was more than halfway down. I’d still not seen a living soul, and from side to side I’d tacked all day, alert to all possibilities, in keeping with the revolutions of my mind. My feet were sore, from not having walked for so long, and after making the decision not to continue through the night I grew instantly rather weary. I looked around for a place to prop, somewhere level and hidden, to eat again, and sleep.
I wandered on slowly, past sprays of rockrose in the cuttings of the track, squinting into the thick shade of the olives, and thinking I might even chance upon a wayside chapel, some star of the sea. I thought of the monk. His body would have gone cold by now. The terraces of Agio Dormiton would be dead quiet. The bell would be still. Not for the first time that day I marvelled at my lack of remorse. Not even a twinge. Perhaps I was no longer human after all? It was hard to tell, being so far out on my own.
But no, it couldn’t be. I felt strong, strangely complete, and felt my life so keenly. More keenly than I ever had. It wasn’t the taste of Andreas’ blood I had in my mouth but the taste of my own self-creation.
We live in our natures, as beasts and by rote until this moment comes. For many it arrives at the point of death, when death, as it seemed to do for Ken Cal, appears like a new sunrise. But for others I believe the moment sidles up in the midst of living. That’s when a morality is born rather than inherited, when it takes its place in harmony not with duty but with freedom.
XXIX
Those first few nights with Leonie at Wait-a-While I was aware of her listening out, for a footfall outside the hut, a human movement, even perhaps the loading of a gun. I held her in my arms imagining all types of stereotypic chivalries I could perform, but I never said a word about them and in the end nothing of the kind was required. Nat Fermoy never came near the place.
It wasn’t in her nature to abandon her father completely, an old man now, in an empty farmhouse, surrounded by scrimshaw ghosts and tragic memories. Once a week she’d cycle off to take him food, she’d cook him a steak, she said, fry him a fish, run his clothes through the mangle and hang them out to dry, on condition that he never said a word, ever again, either about the past or the future. One word, she told him, one whining bleat or recrimination, and she’d be out of there, never to return.
She told me things in that first summer of our love, about her growing up, her roamings alone amongst the boxthorns, the way he used to keep her locked up and scared. But it wasn’t until later, until we’d moved down here to Naracoopa, that I found out the worst of it, and that, ironically enough, was all due to our deepening friendship with Lascelles.
It had taken Lascelles years to finally cobble the money together to have the Memorial Reading Room built. It still stands today, a humble enough structure on the slope there in Currie, but nicely built by the Sanders twins from Surprise Bay. John Sanders had helped me out with this and that when I was building the hut at Wait-a-While and so eventually, after Leonie had stayed put with me and the time came for us to move down the hill for a fresh start near the water, it was he that we asked to do the job. By that stage it was 1951 I believe, the year before they finally built the memorial, and it was Lascelles’ visit out to our new place that convinced him that the time was right to finally get cracking. The problem was that, despite all his fundraising efforts, he and his committee had still fallen short of the required mark. But, after seeing what the Sanders boys had done here for us, and having come to feel quite a deal of personal pressure that the unconventional nature of the memorial he was advocating was the sole reason for the delay, Lascelles decided to take a personal loan of eight hundred pounds to get things over the line.
Like everyone on the island, Leonie and I had watched the fundraising campaign from the outset, but now, as Lascelles took us into his confidence about the loan, we sat back to marvel at the courage of his convictions. The committee he’d formed at the outset had had countless blues over the journey, many defections and attempted coups, but no one had been able to divert Lascelles from the path. In the end I would have to say that, despite his extreme eggheadedness, his social awkwardness, and the touch of the otherworldly that he had about him, Lascelles turned out to be a damned convincing negotiator.
‘What on earth is wrong with erecting another plinth,’ was the common cry, ‘it would cost less and be in step with every other memorial around Australia.’
‘But no,’ Lascelles would calmly say in the monthly meetings held in the hall, ‘can we not offer our diggers more than a mere symbol of our respect? Can’t we offer them, in the difficult years of their resettlement, not only a roof over their head but a path to healing, to happiness?’
In the end it was the island’s taste for practical improvisation that helped get Lascelles’ unusual notion over the line. We are an island after all, an outlier to the mainstream, and though the very fact of our separation can lead to an anxious kind of conformism at times, for the most part, through basic necessity, we end up doing things pretty much our own way.
Lascelles had already accumulated a vast amount of books, clippings, unit histories, and other military documentation, even before the Memorial Reading Room was built. The stories written about me by the journalist fe
lla Noonan were part of this collection, the rest of which Leonie and I saw with our own eyes when, after he had visited our place and made his decision, he requested we visit his house just up the hill from the PO to help confirm to his father that the Sanders twins would be the right choice to build the memorial.
By this stage, and certainly under Leonie’s influence, my position on Lascelles had already softened somewhat. I was learning to tolerate his company, just so long as he didn’t harass me about where I’d been, what I’d done, what I’d seen. Deeper down though, I already harboured a silent store of sympathy for the man. I knew what he’d done for me, even if I didn’t have the wherewithal to admit it. And the fact that he still felt the need to get his father’s approval before proceeding with what he considered to be his national duty amused me greatly at the time.
We knocked on the door that day, sat at the kitchen table with his old dad, Kenneth, who seemed rather a different man at home, without his green post office visor. He had just been for his constitutional swim under the Currie lighthouse, I remember, and his white hair was swept with quite a salty flourish to one side of his narrow head. The elder Lascelles was always very taciturn in the PO but he seemed quite enlivened by our visit to his home and, after approving without hesitation our reckonings regarding the Sanders brothers, he even opened up a little about his prior life in Melbourne, when John was a boy and Mrs Lascelles was still about.
I sensed a certain loneliness about the Lascelles house as old Kenneth spoke about their golden days on Port Phillip Bay. The father and son were both far from your common knockabout types, and neither of them had what you’d call the common touch. They were thinkers, not eccentric as such, but outsiders just the same.