To the Wild Sky

by Ivan Southall

  From up on top Bruce edged down into the heaving water, hanging grimly by one hand to Carol’s lengthening arm, his fingers fastened to her wrist like a vice, in complete dependence upon her. His right leg was so sore below the knee that it affected his use of the rest of his body. If it hadn’t been for Carol and Mark he would never have got up through the escape hatch. He had almost cried from the pain; they’d been pretty rough with him. He was an awful weight for the straining girl to bear, a solid lump. Though Carol looked almost a young woman, she had only the strength of a child. ‘Let go,’ she pleaded with him, ‘please let go, Bruce. You’re too heavy. I’m slipping.’ But he wouldn’t let go and dragged her down after him, shrieking. It might have ended in tragedy, but Carol could swim well enough to save her life and the water gave Bruce a mobility he had not had before. But it did mean that no one was left behind to urge Gerald on or to pass down the suitcases and the bits and pieces they had salvaged from the aircraft. The three of them, Jan, Carol and Bruce, clung to the rope, abusing each other. For about the first time ever Carol didn’t sound like a lady.

  Colin, by then, had struggled to the shore with Mark, dragged him up the sand and dumped him on his face above the water line. He felt so mad with Mark he could cheerfully have kicked him, but all he had left was enough energy to flop on the sand, prop himself up by one elbow, and pant for breath. How often had he tried to get Mark to learn how to swim? But Mark wouldn’t. He was so stubborn about it, and for no reason at all, except that water made him cold!

  Mark was all right; he had a fair load of sea-water on board; but he could groan, he could mumble, he could moan about the pain in his head. Mark would survive. But the others, blow them, were awful slow getting away.

  Colin reeled down in the shallows and saw Jan coming in along the rope with Bruce, pulling him behind her like a toy boat on a string. Carol, unless he was mistaken, was still out beside the Egret, banging a fist on the fuselage and shouting for Gerald.

  ‘Give us a hand,’ wailed Jan. ‘There’s something wrong with his leg all right. At least, if there isn’t, I’ll kill him.

  ‘What’s happening out there?’ said Colin.

  ‘Oh, this big drip pulled Carol in. It’s all his fault. Give us a hand, Col. I’ll never get him up the beach; he can’t walk.’

  ‘Is Gerald still inside?’

  ‘From the noise that Carol’s making he must be . . . hey, hey! Come back. Give us a hand.’

  ‘He’ll walk if he’s got to.’

  ‘Fair go, Col,’ said Bruce. ‘Give her a hand. I can’t put my leg down. Fair dinkum, I can’t.’

  Colin took no notice of them. He was already half-way to the Egret shouting at Carol, ‘What’s wrong out there? What’s wrong with Gerald? Why won’t he come?’

  He reached Carol. She was still beating on the side of the fuselage, screaming Gerald’s name. Only her head was above water and Colin knew she had already been under once or twice. There was no doubt that the tide was coming in. All that it needed to swamp the Egret was a breaker in the wrong place.

  ‘Leave Gerald to me,’ he yelled, ‘you get to the beach.’

  ‘Gerald . . .’ she whimpered.

  ‘He’ll be all right. He’s probably only getting the stuff together.’

  ‘The stuff’s up on top already. It’s all there waiting. That stupid Bruce; he pulled me in. Why doesn’t Gerald answer?’

  ‘Will you stop worrying about Gerald and get yourself up on to that beach!’

  ‘Don’t you talk to me like that!’

  ‘I’ll talk to you any way I please. Do you want to drown or something, you silly dope? The tide’s coming in. Get moving!’

  She seemed to hiss at him through her teeth. He couldn’t see her face but was sure there was hatred all over it, a fierceness that he couldn’t understand. Suddenly, he was so mad with her that he swore at her, then swam to the tail of the Egret and dragged himself up on to it irritably and scrambled along the fuselage until he came to the escape hatch. The suitcases were there and lots of odds and ends, but no sign of Gerald.

  He dropped down inside almost before he realized that he had done it. He wasn’t being brave; it was sheer impulse and the carry-over from his row with Carol. He was angry because he had sworn at her. Colin hardly ever swore. He was dwelling more on that than anything else until he discovered how much the Egret had shifted – or how high the tide had risen. Water was lapping at his chest and all sorts of things were floating around.

  ‘Gerald,’ he yelled in sudden fright. ‘Where are you?’

  Gerald was there all right, still more or less in his seat, with his head against the side of the aircraft, water up to his chin. Colin couldn’t see him, but he found him with his hands, and recoiled from him, horrified. He was sure Gerald was dead. He felt like something dead, like a poor dead animal, drowned.

  ‘Gerald,’ he cried, then felt the Egret lurch again, felt it slip on the seabed, felt a rain of spray from the hatch and the wildest spasm of alarm for his own safety. He was trapped; he was nailed in. It was madness. What on earth was he doing here? How had he come to be here? In that instant he wanted only to claw up through the hatch and swim for his life. But a completely unwanted sense of obligation drove his hands to feel for Gerald again, and when he found him the shock was like a punch. It was like the dead coming to life or the sleeping to violent consciousness. Gerald was under water, right under, but he was struggling and his fingers found Colin’s arms and almost dragged him down. It was like a nightmare.

  Colin found himself heaving and pulling and wrenching at Gerald to break the curious hold that the seat seemed to have on him. It was part of the same fight; it was Gerald’s life or his, or their two lives together. They fought but Gerald couldn’t break free. He was still strapped in!

  Colin panicked and a rush of thoughts that were wholly bad almost consumed him. It would have been better if Gerald had been dead. Then he could have got out himself. Then there would have been nothing to stop him. ‘He’s dead, Carol. There was nothing I could do.’ But she wouldn’t believe him; she’d have felt the Egret lurch; she was outside banging on its outer skin. She’d know that the lurch had frightened him. She’d tell. Then everyone would know that Colin had left his mate to die.

  Oh, it was an awful instant, crowded with horror and with the violence of his savage and desperate thrust that broke Gerald’s grip; horror and violence and then wild elation when he knew that Gerald had let go. He could escape. He could get out and no one would ever know. How could they ever really know if he never told them?

  But that way of thinking wasn’t his own way of thinking; it was something evil that was trying to destroy perhaps both of them; an alien instant when his mind, like an explosion, rushed in all directions at once, but when his body, suddenly freed, elected to drive on downwards to the clasp of the seat harness in Gerald’s lap.

  Gerald burst out, burst upwards, and the two boys fell into a floundering heap of limbs under water. There were all sorts of things in that water, limbs that didn’t belong to them, clothing, seats, sharp edges. Colin broke through for air, then managed to find Gerald’s head and shoulders and dragged them above the surface. But the hatchway was still above him; it wasn’t a door that he could walk through, pulling Gerald after him. How could he go up? They’d never get out, not the two of them.

  Carol screamed, ‘Lift him up! Come on! Lift him up!’

  Her head was there, showing faintly against that square of moon-grey sky and her arms were reaching down. It wasn’t far, not really. The Egret wasn’t as big as a house, the hatch wasn’t yards above them. A tall man had to stoop in her; even a boy sometimes felt the need to duck.

  ‘Help me, Gerald.’ But Gerald couldn’t. His knees were like broken reeds. Colin heaved him upright, reeling and staggering, and Carol caught him by the head and edged her hands under his armpits.

  ‘Heave,’ she said.

  Colin heaved and the pain of the effort was like an incision in his b
ack.

  ‘Again.’

  He heaved again, he pushed, he strained until he thought that something would snap, and suddenly the weight was gone, there was a frantic scuffling overhead and a heavy splash. They were overboard.

  Colin almost cried from his weariness, but he clawed up through the hatch and saw them both in the water on the shoreward side, not far from where the rope would have been. Carol was splashing round and shouting for help, and someone, probably Jan, was already wading out.

  Everything was all right. He wouldn’t have to do any more.

  Colin sighed. Perhaps it was a groan more than a sigh, of relief and disbelief and bone tiredness. He squatted near the hatch, clinging to the lip of it, waiting until Jan had taken charge and the others in the water were out of danger.

  Then he saw something else in the water; debris, things floating and swirling, half-sunken things, bits of paper, a shirt. His groan of relief and tiredness ran into a groan of dismay.

  It was their luggage. The incoming waves had broken over all their things and swept them from the wing into the sea. He’d never be able to get them. Not in a lifetime.

  Colin slid over the side and made his way ashore along the rope, hand over hand, his feet often off the bottom.

  Gerald had a lot of water in him and Jan attended to him. She stretched him out on the sand, knelt beside him, and started pumping his arms and squeezing her hands into the small of his back as she had been taught to do, while Carol looked on fearfully and wretchedly, vaguely bitter inside because Jan was doing it and she wasn’t. Jan knew how to do it and she didn’t.

  Jan did it just as she had done it at the pool, practising on her friends under the eye of her swimming teacher. But no one’s life had depended upon it before and she didn’t really know if it would work. Then the water came up. It worked all right. And soon she had Gerald breathing regularly. Then he rolled on his side, almost of his own accord, and started mumbling and Carol said, ‘Oh, thanks, Jan. Thanks, Jan. Thanks Jan.’

  Jan sat back on her heels, panting, aching from the force she had applied, trying to put Carol’s words together. They were like drumbeats in the distance, full of meaning to other people but without a message for her.

  Colin flopped down nearby, his skin pale and wet and glistening in the moonlight, his thin body shaking from fatigue. He, too, was mumbling: ‘What am I gonna wear? I haven’t got any clothes. I’ve lost m’best suit. Me Mum’ll scalp me.’

  Mark came and sat beside him but couldn’t understand what his brother was saying. It was just a murmur, a moaning sound.

  ‘My head’s sore,’ said Mark. ‘You belted me. You hit me, you did. When I tell Dad he’ll give you a hidin’.’

  Colin mumbled on, not hearing him, lost in his own sorrow. Colin was always so well turned out. Losing his clothes was a real tragedy for Colin.

  Bruce nursed his leg. He felt it up and down again and again like someone mesmerized, like someone ordered to repeat a single act. He was sure it was broken, but Jan said it wasn’t. It hurt like crazy, but no one cared, no one was interested. He felt over it with the flat of his hand and with his fingertips, sure that he would find, sooner or later, a sharp piece of bone breaking the skin. But there weren’t any breaks or bends or blood, and it was too dark to look for bruises. No one cared. And the mosquitoes were a blooming pest. They had teeth like tigers, the blooming things. And he was so hungry. He could eat an ox, horns and all. And he was so tired; so tired and sore and hungry and itching and sick of everything. It was like something out of one of Jan’s dreams.

  He stretched out his leg, painfully and slowly, put his head down, closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  Colin went to sleep, too, and Gerald didn’t really wake up. Jan slipped over on her side in a tight little ball and knew nothing about it, and soon Carol too ceased to be aware of her surroundings. Mark was left on his own, sitting up, holding his throbbing head. But he didn’t know that the others had left him on his own, for little by little the ache became a numbness and soon he did not hear even the thud of the waves on the shore.

  10.

  Nowhere

  There was light and greyness and the clean smell of the morning and the sound of waves drumming softly.

  Mark knew what it was all about. The instant he awoke he knew it was sand that he had slept on and that the birds he could hear were gulls. Everything was remembered; nothing was forgotten; not even his terror when they had pushed him into the water, not even Colin’s brutal hand banging his head against the strut.

  He sat up, creaking a little in his bones, numb in his flesh. He was rather cold and a bit shivery. His clothes were still wet and gritty, but his head felt better. He felt for the lump that had been there the night before but it had gone. So had the sharp, throbbing pain. So, too, had the Egret.

  His eyes ran down the long shelf of sand to where he was sure the Egret had been. All that was left was a frayed and broken rope lying like a tattered reptile at the foot of a boulder.

  He lurched to his feet to view this astonishing thing more clearly. Colin and the others were still sprawled on the sand in all sorts of extraordinary attitudes, still asleep, all of them, and the tide had run out a long way and the sun wasn’t up and the sky was heavily overcast. It wasn’t daylight, it was an in-between light, as though the day had opened a door but had not yet stepped in.

  Where was the Egret?

  Something was there. He could see it better now; a dark mass like a rock and along the beach there were more dark masses like rocks or slabs of stone. Perhaps they were stones. Perhaps they were wreckage.

  It was wreckage all right. The Egret was smashed to bits. There were bits of it everywhere half-buried in sand, great lumps of it in a ragged line around the curve of the beach. Surely they hadn’t slept through a storm? Perhaps they had, because Mark suddenly felt full of sand and when he looked closer at the others they were covered in sand, dusted with it. Colin looked like a figure of a sleeping boy hewn out of sandstone.

  Surely they hadn’t slept through a storm?

  Mark brushed the sand off himself, spat it from his mouth and shook it from his hair, then took off his shoes and socks and walked down to where the Egret had been. It was the engine that was there and the propeller and a tangle of wires and cables and pipes, all ragged and broken as though a sea monster had bitten it off. Thick, slow oil was still bleeding from it and dripping into the sand. What a shame. That beaut little aeroplane all chewed to bits.

  It was a funny feeling, standing there, with his toes slowly sinking and curling into the sand, and the greyness round about, the smell of the sea, and the sound of the sea, and the silence that was there, too. Strange the way the feeling came creeping up on him, almost as though he had become a balloon floating in an empty and aching place; like being completely alone and light-headed; like still being asleep, perhaps; like not being Mark Kerr any more, but someone different that he wasn’t even sure that he knew very well, because the eagerness that he usually felt first thing every morning to get the day rolling, to get it started, to leap about for the sheer joy of living, just wasn’t there. Instead, there was a flatness, a greyness.

  Everything familiar seemed to have gone a long way away and Mark didn’t like it very much. He liked a bit of friendly noise in the morning, the wireless going and screen doors slamming and hens squawking down the yard and dogs barking and the clatter of milk bottles and men’s voices from the dairy depot across the road. He liked the world to be alive and kicking.

  He didn’t like churches or the silent minute on Anzac Day. He didn’t like hospitals or rubbish tips or places where people were quiet or in pain. He didn’t much like standing near the aeroplane, either, with that thick, slow oil bleeding from it and dripping into the sand, even though there were things lying round that were as good as pirates’ treasure; interesting looking bits of aeroplane, metal tabs with important printing on, and instruments worth lots and lots of money. If a fella owned an instrument like one
of these his mates would come from miles and miles around to have a look at it, but maybe Gerald wouldn’t like it if he took one. Or that blooming old Carol either. They’d call him a thief, probably, and take it off him. Maybe Bruce would, too, because Bruce hadn’t been very nice to him either.

  Mark looked up the beach to where they were lying; still sprawling there, all of them. Fancy not waking up. But it was the same at home. No one woke up there either until the day was half done.

  Mark scowled at them and would have gone up and yelled ‘Wakey, wakey,’ except that he had lost confidence. His skin was pretty thick, but not so thick that their impatience and crossness with him had failed to get through. But Colin was different, of course. Colin was his brother. Colin knocked him about more than anyone, but Colin was different just the same. A fella could take from his family things he would never take from anyone else. Yeh; but he didn’t want to go, somehow, not even to Colin.

  He mooched off along the sand, digging his toes in, taking a meandering path from stone to stone, from shell to shell, even from one bit of wreckage to another, sometimes scratching himself, sometimes belching magnificently. (At school his belch was famous.) He had a very empty tummy and it rumbled and bubbled and he got to thinking about breakfast and eyed off a couple of cheeky-looking seagulls. Maybe a seagull cooking on the spit would make some sort of a beginning to the day!

  He tried to run one down, but it took off and flew away. He tried aiming rocks at others but their flight was too nimble. So he called them a few names and pulled on his hair in irritation, an unconscious mannerism borrowed from his mother, and looked back to where the Egret was. No one was sitting up; no one was awake; or at least he didn’t think so. The light wasn’t good, but not so bad that a fella couldn’t see a few hundred yards.

  He trudged on a bit farther, farther away from them, then stopped quite suddenly, quite breathlessly.

  Mark didn’t actually feel sick, but almost. There was a heavy thud of his heart that seemed to strike at his insides from all directions.