by Mark Dapin
‘. . . Pincus . . .’
Myer came to Jimmy’s side.
‘During the worst times,’ said Jimmy, ‘there’s only two things that keep you going – your mates and your sense of humour. Pincus here was the funniest man in Changi . . .’
Myer flushed.
‘. . . he was the mainstay of the famous Changi Concert Party, and the only one who didn’t have to dress up as a sheila to get a laugh. No Aussie who did time in Changi will ever forget the clown prince of Selarang. For three and half years he had us all in stitches that even Weary Dunlop couldn’t’ve sewn up.
‘Laugh?’ said Jimmy, ‘I thought I’d wet myself. But it turned out to be just the monsoon. Give us a turn, Pincus Myer!’
Myer looked at the ground.
‘Anyone could’ve been a hit in Changi,’ he said. ‘We had a captive audience.’
Everyone laughed.
‘There’s a song we used to sing in Changi,’ said Myer. ‘It was written about a mate of Jimmy’s who was a real . . . sportsman. He can’t be with us today, because age didn’t weary him.
‘Nor,’ said Myer, sounding his words one at a time, ‘did the years condemn. I’m not much of a singer, so I’m going to ask Jimmy and Ernie to help me out here.’
Myer sang softly as if it were a hymn, ‘“I went to Changi races, it was on the twelfth of June . . .”’
Katz joined in with a voice that seemed too big and bassy for his skinny body, ‘“Nineteen hundred and forty two on a summer’s afternoon . . .”’
Jimmy clapped time softly to their song, and bowed his head when the audience applauded.
‘I can’t go yet,’ Jimmy whispered to me.
‘Go where?’ I asked.
‘I’m waiting for Dominique,’ he said.
Dee from the Thai Dee floated through the gates, wearing a cheongsam like the one Frida had sewn for Mei-Li. She looked even more beautiful outside the restaurant, and the frummers stared at her even though she wasn’t kosher.
Dee stroked the roof of the spirit house.
‘Did you make this yourself?’ she asked Jimmy.
‘The boy did a lot of the work,’ he said.
‘Oh!’ squealed Mei-Li, and she clapped.
And the old men were right. It did make my weenie get bigger.
Dee picked up the elephant Jimmy had stolen from the restaurant.
‘There are no elephants in this country,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Jimmy, ‘I don’t suppose there are.’
She dropped the animal into her purse, then touched the mane of the stolen horse.
‘Could they keep that?’ asked Jimmy. ‘Please?’
‘Your friend liked horses?’ she asked.
‘More than anything,’ said Jimmy.
Dee cut the ribbon and declared the house open.
The Maoris danced a haka and stuck out their tongues at Grandma, who stuck out her tongue back. The frummers sang ‘Hava Nagila’, and Sollykatzanmyer danced like Cossacks.
While Mendoza’s bodyguard escorted Mendoza to the bathroom, Myer rested a hand on the blonde girl’s brown legs.
‘How about a kiss for an old soldier?’ he asked.
‘How about you piss off,’ she said.
‘So I suppose a handjob’s out of the question.’
‘Seventy-five dollars,’ said the girl.
‘Jesus,’ said Myer. ‘It’s gone up since 1951.’
‘Hang on,’ said Solomon. ‘Did you pay for your handjob on the AJEX march?’
‘I may have given her a cab fare home,’ admitted Myer.
‘Where did she live?’ asked Solomon.
‘Wollongong,’ he said, ‘judging by the size of the fare.’
They drank like soldiers. Even Grandma had a glass of sherry and lemonade, and Dad sipped at a Drambuie.
‘I’ve never seen anyone drink that before,’ said Jimmy. ‘I don’t even know what it is.’
The old men huddled together.
‘We should’ve done this before,’ said Katz. ‘For the others.’
‘I do it every night,’ said Jimmy. ‘I drink with them.’
Myer rubbed his eyes.
‘I do too,’ he said. ‘I always have.’
Katz took Jimmy’s elbow.
‘The war shaped our lives,’ he said. ‘Without it, you’d never’ve met Townsville Jack. You’d never have known Mei-Li. Some of the shit was worth it in the end.’
Jimmy smiled.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ he said.
Katz nodded.
‘You left this at my flat,’ he said.
Jimmy took the doctor’s letter and put it in his back pocket.
Dad came over and asked if Jimmy wanted to play a frame next Sunday.
‘If I’m not there,’ said Jimmy, ‘start without me.’
I took a swallow of Dad’s Drambuie. It tasted like the label.
‘Oh my Hashem,’ said Dad. ‘It’s your mother.’
Mum came out of a taxi wearing a long-sleeved dress, so she wouldn’t look like a slut who’d run off with a Christian. She ran to Grandma and gave her a hug that squeezed the colour out of her face.
Jimmy turned his back to her.
‘Dad . . .’ said Mum.
I always found it strange when Mum called Jimmy ‘Dad’.
‘Please . . .’ said Mum.
Katz steered Jimmy around and prodded him towards her.
Mum jumped on Jimmy and wrapped him in her arms. He pushed her back, but it was only to look at her, to stroke her long hair before he kissed her. He held her until his arms tired, then passed her back to Grandma.
When Mum saw Dad she walked slowly towards him. I wanted to follow her, to grab them both and pull them together and make us a family again, but they passed without looking or speaking. Mum went to the bathroom, and when she came back Dad had gone.
Mum took me home at eight o’clock, so I wasn’t there for the end. I heard later that Solomon was sent to Kemeny’s to fetch two more bottles of whisky, and the Maoris brought rum and children. Jimmy carried out his deckchair, and he sat smiling, waving away guests when they blocked his view of the spirit house.
‘Now the ghosts are rested,’ said Grandma to Jimmy, ‘we can do all the things we said we’d do. We can go and see Deborah in Israel, and you can paint the back wall.’
‘Israel hasn’t got a back wall,’ said Jimmy.
‘Every day I thank God I married a comedian,’ said Grandma.
‘I have had a perfectly wonderful evening,’ said Jimmy, ‘but this wasn’t it.’
And he nodded off in his chair.
By nightfall the old men were asleep, with Solomon stretched out drunk on the pavement – just like when he’d been banned from my grandmother’s house in 1953.
At dawn Katz shook Jimmy by the shoulders.
‘How does a man get a cup of tea around here?’ he asked.
‘How would he know?’ said Solomon. ‘Ask a man.’
Katz pursed his lips by Jimmy’s ear and whistled the Reveille. Jimmy did not stir. Katz felt his pulse, listened for his heart, thumped his chest and called an ambulance. The ambos covered Jimmy with a sheet when they carried him away.
BOTANY CEMETERY
WEDNESDAY 23 MAY 1990
At the funeral, Grandma walked among the tombstones, leaving pebbles behind. Mum left the service early to help prepare the food with Deborah Who Lives in Israel, who’d flown in from Haifa that morning. Solomon – suddenly ‘Uncle Solly’ – drove me to my grandmother’s house. Katz and Myer sat in the back seat of the Volvo, passing a pewter hipflask between them.
Katz gave me a thick hardback book with a red leather cover.
‘My diaries,’ he said.
I looked blindly at yellow pages filled with tiny letters.
‘There’re stories about Jimmy,’ he said. ‘Memories for you to keep.’
At the house, Solomon and Myer pressed gifts into Grandma’s hands: a tiny brown cardigan, a small pair of reading gla
sses, work boots and a cap. Katz gave her a thumbnail portrait.
‘Groucho Marx,’ he said.
Grandma shielded her eyes and turned her head, then lashed out, knocking the presents aside, crying that she wanted Jimmy there with her, not away with the ghosts. But we gathered up the things and took them to the spirit house, where we made space for the clothes in the wardrobe in Mei-Li’s room.
We all knew where Jimmy wanted to be.
SYDNEY DIARY
APRIL 1949
I have been painting for four months, but the canvas is as empty as my soul. I cannot sketch what I see in my mind, all the terror and humiliation, the hunger and hopelessness, the pointless screaming deaths. I had hoped that my facility (I can barely call it a skill, still less a talent) for art (No! Illustration!) would return within days or weeks, but I am coming to understand it has gone forever, an unspoken part of the bargain, the price I paid to survive. How can I paint with the blood of soldiers, with brushes made from their lashes and dipped in a palette of bone?
Every night I dream the same dream. I wake up in cotton sheets (and that is the cruellest part of all, the nightmare begins with an awakening) to a servant bringing breakfast on a tray. I struggle to recall how I came to employ staff. Did I paint a portrait that captured the spirit of a man (and I know which man, I know who I would have chosen) with such poetry that I won prizes, acclaim, fortune?
I look into the face of a butler, and I recognise a comrade from the war.
‘You survived,’ I say.
He laughs.
‘We all did,’ he says. ‘The others are out there waiting for you. There’s Foley, O’Connor, Grimshaw, Evans and Trent, the tall one they called Shorty and the thief Diamond Tom. There’s White Alf and Black Alf –’
‘But he died,’ I protest. ‘I watched them bury him.’
‘The stake missed his heart,’ says the butler, ‘and the soil was rich with corpse meat. He ate it to survive. Now his breath stinks of the grave, and nothing, neither man nor demon, will ever conquer him.
‘Come,’ beckons the butler, and he leads me from my bed, through my studio, into the parlour, where a tall man sits with his back to me, and my heart cries out with happiness as he turns his head.
‘Even you,’ I say.
‘Even me?’ he asks. ‘Wouldn’t I always have been the hardest to kill? How could you ever believe I wouldn’t survive?’
‘But how?’ I ask.
‘I hid in the reeds. They put me in a basket and floated me down the river.’
‘And the others?’ I ask. ‘White Alf and Black Alf and Foley . . .’
‘Oh, they’re dead,’ he says.
‘But the butler told me . . .’
But when I look back, the butler has gone, and the tall man has turned to bone, and his carpals and metacarpals are shattered, his femurs and radials, his pelvis and wrists, his fingers and toes are all broken into pieces, his death’s-head caved in from every side.
That is how I start my day. I take breakfast alone, then return to my studio, in a gown, half-dressed, or naked. I try to paint, but when I raise my brush to the easel, a cankered hand grabs me from the grave and drags my wrist down to my waist, to hang limp and wilted, to mock my pretentions at redemption.
There have been reunions, where old friends grasp each other by the arms with wonder at the muscle that has returned, and see faces they have known only as skulls given flesh, as if a sculptor has applied a skin of clay to a wire frame. They drink beer from the bottle and sing the old songs from the camps, whose lyrics bear nuances only they will ever understand. They have a comradeship born in hell. I know because I have been told.
But I am not permitted in a ballroom or a bar with the men I loved and still love. I will always be alone, never to share my memories of butterflies and hibiscus, waterfalls and the Buddha caves, spirit houses and the very best of men.
Occasionally I receive mail from a survivor of the camps. One envelope contained a bullet and nothing else. I weighed the shell in my palm, balanced it between my thumb and forefinger, and slipped it into my service revolver. I poured myself a finger of whisky, pointed the gun at my temples and squeezed the trigger. In this, as in so many other matters, the Japanese knew best.
But the round was not live. It was not a weapon, it was a warning or a wish, a hope and a promise. I hardly eat, I barely drink water. I do not exercise or socialise or go out in the light. In my refrigerator I store only cooked rice. I ration myself to a pint a day. I eat from a dixie, boil tea in a billy, and I have buried my paintings in graves. The perfumed flesh of women holds no allure for me. I cannot remember why I was ever drawn to something so trivial.
I have sent back my medals. Each one of them weighs more than a man and when I wear them I cannot stand. I have renounced my rank and turned my back on my religion.
I take my first whisky as the sun goes down, and I force myself to think of all those men I failed.
Buddhists believe there are eight echelons of hell, and on the upper levels exist the hungry ghosts, who died violently before their time, or were orphan souls who had no children. The hungry ghosts come looking for the living at night. They have huge stomachs, necks like wire and tiny mouths like the lips of choleras. They can never get enough food to keep them from starving, and when they eat, it turns to ashes in their mouths.
The ghosts swirl around me. I drink and I drink and I drink until they are gone. Then I take myself to bed, and the dream begins again. I wake up in cotton sheets to a servant bringing breakfast on a tray.
For me, there are no trails to cut through the jungle, no loaded boats or cache of live grenades. For me, there is no way of escape.
Lieutenant Colonel William Randall Duffy
REDFERN
SATURDAY 26 MAY 1990
Katz’s diaries began on Christmas Day in 1953 when Jimmy didn’t come home because he heard Mei-Li was dead.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my agent, Deborah Callaghan, as always (except at the launch of my last book, when I forgot to thank her). Thanks to my publisher, Tom Gilliatt, for all the great suggestions he made, and the stupid ones he didn’t (ie ‘Why don’t we put Jimmy in the SAS?’). Thanks to Catherine Day and Julia Stiles, my editors at Pan Macmillan. Thanks to Judith Whelan, my editor at Good Weekend, for encouraging and indulging my interest in the Second World War. Thanks to Claire and Ben and Sara, for putting up with me at home (especially when I wasn’t drinking).
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First published by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd, 2011
This edition published by Penguin Australia Pty Ltd, 2015
Text copyright © Mark Dapin 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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ISBN: 978-1-76014-053-3
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