Fly Away Peter

by David Malouf

  Occasionally these shadows took on shape. A white-capped sister, a man in a butcher’s apron all sopped with blood. Jim looked and there was a block where the man was working. He could smell it, and the eyes of the others, cowed as they were, took life as they fell upon it.

  To his left, on the other side from the men who waited, who were mostly whole, lay the parts of men, the limbs. A jumbled pile.

  I am in the wrong place, Jim thought. I don’t belong here. I never asked to be here. I should get going.

  He thought this, but knew that the look on his face must be the same look these other faces wore, anxious, submissive. They were a brotherhood. They had spent their whole life thus, a foot from the block and waiting, even in safe city streets and country yards, even at home in Australia. Is that it? Jim wondered. Is that how it must always be?

  He turned to regard the man on his right, who was also laid out on a palliasse, and saw who it was.

  How did he get here?

  He closed his eyes. This was the place before the butcher’s block. He did not want to be lifted up.

  ‘Jim?’

  He knew the voice.

  ‘Jim Saddler?’

  He was being called for the second time.

  It was Ashley Crowther. He was there, just to the right, also in the shambles. Jim blinked. It was Ashley alright. He was wearing a luggage-label like all the rest, tied with string to one of the buttons of his tunic.

  He had seen Ashley twice since they came to France. Far back in the early days, when things were still quiet, their battalions had been in the same line, and they had stood together one day on a patch of waste-ground, on the same level, just as they might have stood at home, and had a smoke. It was a Sunday afternoon. Cold and still.

  ‘Listen,’ Ashley had said, ‘band music.’ And Jim, whose ears were keen enough to catch any birdcall but hadn’t been aware of the music, heard it blowing faintly towards them from the enemy lines. Had it been there a moment before, or had Ashley somehow conjured it up?

  ‘Von Suppé,’ Ashley said, raising a ringer to conduct the odd wavering sounds of Sunday afternoon brass.

  ‘Listen’ he said now, and his voice came closer. ‘Can you hear me, Jim?’

  The second occasion had been less than a month ago. They were way to the north, resting, and on the last night, after a whole day’s drilling – for rest was just the name of another sort of activity, less dangerous but no less fatiguing than life in the lines – they were marched up the road to an abandoned château where several fellows were sitting about in the late light under trees and others were lining up at a makeshift estaminet.

  A piano had been brought down from the château, a big iron-framed upright with bronze candle-holders. It sat under the trees with a tarpaulin over it in case of rain. Several fellows, one after the other, sang popular songs and they all joined in and a redheaded sergeant from one of the English regiments played a solo on the mouth-organ. Later, a boy whose voice had still to break sang ‘O for the wings of a Dove’; it was a sound of such purity, so high, so clear, that the whole orchard was stilled, a voice, neither male nor female, that was, when you lay back and closed your eyes, like the voice of an angel, though when you opened them again and looked, was climbing from the mouth of a child in a patched and ragged uniform no different from the rest, who stood bare-headed in the flickering light from the piano-sconces and when he had finished and unclasped his big hands seemed embarrassed by the emotion he had created, humbled by his own gift.

  The concert went on in the dark. Jim heard a nightingale, then another, and tuned his ears, beyond the music, to that – though the music pleased him too; it was good to have both. He thought of Mrs McNamara’s contention, so long ago, that it was the most beautiful of all birdsongs, and the other girl’s regret that she had never heard it. Well, he had heard it. He was hearing it now. The trees, though they had been badly blasted, were in full leaf, and would in time, even with no one to tend them, bear fruit. It was their nature. Overhead, all upside down as was proper in these parts, were the stars. The guns sounded very far off. It was like summer thunder that you didn’t have to concern yourself with: someone else’s weather. Jim dozed off.

  When he woke it was quite late and the crowd of men had thinned. Someone was playing the piano. Notes, he thought, that might have been taken over from the nightingale’s song and elaborated, all tender trills. The strangeness of the place, the open air, or the keying up of his nerves in these last hours before going back, worked strangely upon him and he found himself powerfully affected. He sat up on one elbow and listened.

  The music was neither gay nor sad, it didn’t need to be either one or the other; it was like the language, beyond known speech, that birds use, which he felt painfully that he might reach out for now and comprehend; and if he did, however briefly, much would become clear to him that would otherwise stay hidden. He looked towards the square wooden frame like an altar with its flickering candles, and immediately recognised the man who was playing. It was Ashley Crowther.

  He looked different, changed; Jim was astonished by him. It was as if the music drew him physically together. In the intensity of its occurrence at his finger-ends, his whole body – shoulders, neck, head – came to a kind of attention Jim had not seen there on previous occasions.

  Now, still dressed in that new firmness of line, Ashley Crowther was here. His voice once again came close.

  ‘Can you hear me, Jim?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He had in the middle of his forehead a small cross. A wound? The mark of Cain? Jim was puzzled. He had seen a man wounded like that, the body quite unmarked and just a small star-shaped hole in the middle of the forehead. Only this was a cross.

  ‘Jim we’ve got to get out of here. I know the way. Are you strong enough to get up? I’ll help you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jim said, deciding to take the risk, and was aware in the darkness of a sudden hiss of breath that was his father’s impatience.

  He raised himself on his elbows. Ashley leaned down and put a hand under his arm. He was raised, but not towards the block. He stood and Ashley supported him. The relief he felt had something to do with the strength of Ashley’s arm – who would ever have expected it? – but also with his own capacity, once more, to accept and trust.

  ‘This way. No one will stop us.’

  The nurses were too busy or too tired to observe what they were about, and the man in the bloody apron, all brilliant and deeply shadowed in the light of the flare, was fully engaged at the block. They walked right past them and out under the tent-flap into the night. Jim heaved a great sigh of relief. He too wore a label, its string twisted round one of his tunic buttons. He tore it roughly away now, button and all, and cast it into the mud. He wouldn’t need an address label. Though Ashley, he saw, still wore his.

  ‘This way,’ Ashley said, and they walked quickly across the field towards a patch of wood. It was clear moonlight.

  Difficult to say how long they walked. It became light, and off in the woods the birds started up.

  ‘Here,’ Ashley said, ‘here it is.’

  It was a clearing, quite large, and Jim thought he had been here before. And he had, he had! It was the place where he had gone with the others to collect firewood and seen the old man digging. No, not graves, but planting something. He had often thought of the man but the place itself he had forgotten, and he was surprised now to see how thick the woods were, how the blasted trees had renewed themselves with summer growth, covering their wounds, and were turning colour, now that the autumn had come, and stripping. There were thick drifts underfoot. They crackled. A few last birds were singing: two thrushes, and further off somewhere, a chaffinch. Jim moved on out of the softly slanting light. There was a garden in the clearing, neat rows of what looked like potatoes, and figures, dark-backed and slowly moving, were on their knees between the plants, digging.

  He freed himself of Ashley’s support, and staggered towards them. The earth smelled so
good. It was a smell that belonged to the beginning of things, he could have put his nose down into it like a pig or a newly weaned calf, and the thought of filling his hands with its doughy softness was irresistible. To have dirt under his nails! Falling on his knees he began awkwardly to knead the earth, which was warm, damp, delightfully crumbly, and then to claw at it as the others were doing. It felt good.

  ‘That’s it, mate. That’s the style! Dig!’

  Jim looked around, astonished. It was Clancy Parkett, whom he had last seen nearly a year ago, and whom he believed was dead, blown into so many pieces that nothing of him was ever found except what Jim himself had been covered with. To give poor Clancy a decent burial, some wit had said, they would have had to bury the both of them. And now here he was quite whole after all, grinning and rasping his chin with a blackened thumb. Trust Clancy. Clancy would wriggle out of anything.

  ‘I thought you’d been blown up,’ Jim said foolishly. ‘You just disappeared into thin air.’

  ‘No,’ Clancy told him, ‘not air, mate. Earth.’ And he held up a fistful of the richly smelling mud. ‘It’s the only way now. We’re digging through to the other side.’

  ‘But it’ll take so long,’ Jim said reasonably.

  Clancy laughed. ‘There’s all the time in the world, mate. No trouble about time. And it’s better than tryin’ t’ walk it.’

  Jim, doubtful, began to dig. He looked about. Others were doing the same, long lines of them, and he was surprised to see how large the clearing was. It stretched away to the brightening skyline. It wasn’t a clearing but a field, and more than a field, a landscape; so wide, as the early morning sun struck the furrows, that you could see the curve of the earth. There were hundreds of men, all caked with mud, long-haired, bearded, in ragged uniforms, stooped to the black earth and digging. So it must be alright after all. Why else should so many be doing it? The lines stretched out forever. He could hardly make out the last men, they were so small in the distance. And Clancy. Clancy was no fool.

  He began to dig in earnest. He looked about once, seeking Ashley, but Ashley Crowther was no longer in sight.

  So Jim dug along with the rest. The earth was rich and warm, it smelled of all that was good, and his back did not ache as he had expected. Nor did his knees. And there was, after all, time, however far it might be. The direct route – straight through. He looked up, meeting Clancy’s humorous gaze, and they both grinned. It might be, Jim thought, what hands were intended for, this steady digging into the earth, as wings were meant for flying over the curve of the planet to another season. He knelt and dug.

  18

  IMOGEN HARCOURT, STILL carrying her equipment – camera, plates, tripod – as she had once told Jim, ‘like the implements of martyrdom,’ made her way down the soft sand of the dunes towards the beach.

  A clear October day.

  October here was spring. Sunlight and no wind.

  The sea cut channels in the beach, great Vs that were delicately ridged at the edges and ribbed within, and the sunlit rippled in them, an inch, an inch and a half of shimmering gold. Further on, the surf. High walls of water were suspended a moment, held glassily aloft, then hurled themselves forward under a shower of spindrift, a white rush that ran hissing to her boots. There were gulls, dense clouds of them hanging low over the white-caps, feeding, oystercatchers darting after crabs, crested terns. A still scene that was full of intense activity and endless change.

  She set down her equipment – she didn’t intend to do any work; she carried all this stuff by force of habit and because she didn’t like to be separated from it, it was all she had, an extension of herself that couldn’t now be relinquished. She eased the strap off her shoulder, set it all down and then sat dumpily beside it, a lone figure with her hat awry, on the white sands that stretched as far as the eye could see, all the way to the Broadwater and the southern tip of Stradbroke in one direction and in the other to Point Danger and the New South Wales border. It was all untouched. Nobody came here. Before her, where she sat with her boots dug in and her knees drawn up, was the Pacific, blue to the skyline, and beyond it, Peru.

  ‘What am I doing here?’ she asked herself, putting the question for maybe the thousandth time and finding no answer, but knowing that if she were back in Norfolk there would be the same question to be put and with no answer there either.

  ‘I am doing’ she told herself firmly, ‘what those gulls are doing. Those oystercatchers. Those terns.’ She pulled her old hat down hard on her curls.

  The news of Jim’s death had already arrived. She heard it by accident in the local store, then she heard it again from Julia Crowther, with the news that Ashley Crowther had been wounded in the same battle, though not in the same part of the field, and was convalescing in England. Then one day she ran into Jim’s father.

  ‘I lost my boy,’ he told her accusingly. He had never addressed her before.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  He regarded her fiercely. She had wanted to say more, to say that she understood a little of what he might feel, that for two whole days after she heard she had been unable to move; but that would have been to boast of her grief and claim for herself something she had no right to and which was too personal to be shared, though she felt, obscurely, that to share it with this man who was glaring at her so balefully and with such a deep hatred for everything he saw, might be to offer him some release from himself and to let Jim, now that he was dead, back into his life. What did he feel? What was his grief like? She couldn’t tell, any more than he could have guessed at or measured hers. She said nothing. He didn’t invite sympathy. It wasn’t for that that he had approached her.

  She sat on the beach now and watched the waves, one after another, as they rose, gathered themselves, stood poised a moment holding the sun at their crests, then toppled. There was a rhythm to it. Mathematics. It soothed, it allowed you, once you had perceived it, to breathe. Maybe she would go on from birds to waves. They were as various and as difficult to catch at their one moment.

  That was it, the thought she had been reaching for. Her mind gathered and held it, on a breath, before the pull of the earth drew it apart and sent it rushing down with such energy into the flux of things. What had torn at her breast in the fact of Jim’s death had been the waste of it, all those days that had been gathered towards nothing but his senseless and brutal extinction. Her pain lay in the acute vision she had had of his sitting as she had seen him on that first day, all his intense being concentrated on the picture she had taken of the sandpiper, holding it tight in his hand, but holding it also in his eye, his mind, absorbed in the uniqueness of the small creature as the camera had caught it at just that moment, with its head cocked and its fierce alert eye, and in entering that one moment of the bird’s life – the bird was gone, they might never see it again – bringing up to the moment, in her vision of him, his own being that was just then so very like the birds, alert, unique, utterly present.

  It was that intense focus of his whole being, it’s me, Jim Saddler, that struck her with grief, but was also the thing – and not simply as an image either – that endured. That in itself. Not as she might have preserved it in a shot she had never in fact taken, nor even as she had held it, for so long, as an untaken image in her head, but in itself, as it for its moment was. That is what life meant, a unique presence, and it was essential in every creature. To set anything above it, birth, position, talent even, was to deny to all but a few among the infinite millions what was common and real, and what was also, in the end, most moving. A life wasn’t for anything. It simply was.

  She watched the waves build, hang and fall, one after the other in decades, in centuries, all morning and on into the early afternoon; and was preparing, wearily, to gather up her equipment and start back – had risen in fact, and shouldered the tripod, when she saw something amazing.

  A youth was walking – no, running, on the water. Moving fast over the surface. Hanging delicately balanced
there with his arms raised and his knees slightly bent as if upheld by invisible strings. She had seen nothing like it. He rode rapidly towards her; then, on the crest of the wave, sharply outlined against the sky, went down fast into the darkening hollow, fell, and she saw a kind of plank flash in the sunlight and go flying up behind him.

  She stood there. Fascinated. The youth, retrieving the board among the flurry of white in the shallows, knelt upon it and began paddling out against the waves. Far out, a mere dot on the sunlit water, where the waves gathered and began, she saw him paddle again, then miraculously rise, moving faster now, and the whole performance was repeated: the balance, the still dancing on the surface, the brief etching of his body against the sky at the very moment, on the wave’s lip, when he would slide into its hollows and fall.

  That too was an image she would hold in her mind.

  Jim, she said to herself, Jim, Jim, and hugged her breast a little, raising her face to the light breeze that had come with afternoon, feeling it cold where the tears ran down. The youth, riding towards her, was blurred in the moment before the fall.

  She took up her camera and set the strap to her shoulder. There was a groove. She turned her back to the sea and began climbing the heavy slope, where her boots sank and filled and the grains rolled away softly behind. At the top, among the pigweed that held the dunes together, she turned, and the youth was still there, his arms extended, riding.

  It was new. So many things were new. Everything changed. The past would not hold and could not be held. One day soon, she might make a photograph of this new thing. To catch its moment, its brilliant balance up there, of movement and stillness, of tense energy and ease – that would be something.

  This eager turning, for a moment, to the future, surprised and hurt her.

  Jim, she moaned silently, somewhere deep inside. Jim. Jim. There was in there a mourning woman who rocked eternally back and forth; who would not be seen and was herself.