Dreaming the Enemy

by David Metzenthen

  ‘I’m sorry I don’t have biscuits.’ Curtis put his mug on a coaster featuring the Sydney Harbour Bridge. ‘Usually my mother sends some down. Anyway. Next time. So what type of work have you been doing, John?’

  Johnny thanked him for the tea and spared a quick thought for Curtis’s well-intentioned mother.

  ‘Unfortunately, mate,’ Johnny said, ‘I’ve been in Vietnam trying to kill people.’ He picked up the hot mug. ‘Not very successfully. Unless you count some of my mates who I didn’t manage to look after. I’m sorry to be a smartarse, but that’s the truth.’

  Curtis leant on his forearms, shirtsleeves neatly buttoned at the wrist. His gaze held purpose.

  ‘John,’ he said. ‘The responsibility for your actions in that place should be shared by everyone in this country. Might I be right in assuming you did not volunteer?’

  ‘I certainly did bloody not.’ The words ripped up out of Johnny’s throat.

  Curtis nodded, sipped tea. ‘You’ll see the statue of the digger down by Memorial Park. Although Adden is not a very progressive place, I hope you’ll find the support you deserve here.’

  Johnny took a good hard look at Mister Curtis Stringer.

  ‘Curtis,’ he said, ‘I think I already have. Now, how does this CES thing actually work?’

  Curtis held up a form bearing the red CES logo.

  ‘Step One, surprise surprise, is that we have to fill out one of these things.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go.’ Johnny shifted his chair towards the desk, angled it to one side, aware that everything in the place might also be a little angled off to one side.

  ‘You’ll need benefits ASAP.’ Curtis uncapped a black ballpoint. ‘I can expedite that. Basically because there’s not a job I’d judge suitable for a person recovering from long exposure to a high-stress situation. Unless you could see yourself working in an abattoir.’ Curtis looked up, pen poised.

  A laugh jerked upwards in Shoey’s chest. He felt he might have to slap himself.

  ‘Mate, I do not.’ Johnny drank tea, trying to get a grip. ‘So has anyone told you lately that you’re good at your job?’

  Curtis stopped. ‘God assures me I am doing my best.’

  ‘Well,’ Johnny replied, ‘he’s right. Now, someone told me I have to do an interview. So, can we get on to that quick-smart as I’ve—’

  ‘Already done.’ Curtis sat, pen pinched between two fingers like a dart to be thrown. ‘My office will not be run like the Spanish Inquisition. I make a judgement on a person’s situation on behalf of the Commonwealth. And that’s that.’

  Shoey surrendered to Curtis’s process, which seemed allied to the slow-motion feel of the old wooden town, the treed hills, and the curling coastline that lassoed the place. He figured he’d stumbled into somewhere weirdly kind of special. He hoped the feeling would last.

  During the war, in a clearing, Johnny had walked around the twisted wreckage of an armoured personnel carrier. It had been left far behind, unlike the memories it generated in its failure to protect the soldiers who rode in it. Now it seemed Khan also pictured that same piece of wreckage as it rusted away in the silence of peacetime.

  The minds of people, Khan decided, although sometimes more resilient than armoured plating, remained damaged for just as long. He also knew, as Johnny knew, that he would never be happy in the way he had been before the war.

  Khan felt that he’d absorbed the deaths of Thang and Trung, and most likely that of Phuong as well. He also held a hundred thousand other stilled hearts and silenced voices somewhere in his soul. Few of the millions from the north were coming back and the reality of that hovered like a black cloud – a cloud as poisonous as the actions of people in high places in countries he knew existed somewhere far over the horizon.

  Johnny couldn’t argue with Khan on that score. It wasn’t as if the Viet Cong rocked up in Bourke Street and opened fire in Myers. Both Khan and Johnny knew the diggers had to travel a bloody long way to get into the fight. So you definitely have us there, Shoey admitted. You definitely do. Now get on with your dinner, if you could call it that.

  Johnny pictured Khan eating dinner with his aged parents before leaving the house for an evening walk. The one-armed fisherman followed a winding road that soon plunged into darkness. How peaceful the sky was, Khan thought, now that it was decorated only with stars, and how perfect the river on which floated only ducks, lilies, and lotus. There were no jets, no bombers, no Hueys loaded with Marines or Australians, and no patrol boats on the rivers machinegunning buffalo or people. There was no enemy at all.

  Except the ones we carry in our heads, Johnny noted. We certainly can’t lose them, the real and the imaginary, the living and the dead. Endlessly they move up and down the trails of memory, setting and springing traps, constantly changing shape and form. And they will always be more complex than the soldiers they haunt, he decided, which is why the bastards are so hard to silence.

  Khan saw that the country was slowly coming back to itself. Painfully it was settling into its recent history, to begin the long process of healing. He only hoped that one morning he might wake and find himself free of the anger no one felt he had a right to have. Until then, he would simply be Khan, the smiling not-very-good fisherman, the unhappiest and poorest person he knew.

  At least you won the war, Johnny reminded him. Although we really don’t like to admit that.

  Shoey had the key in the car door when a woman built like a forty-four-gallon drum bailed him up.

  ‘You been to Vietnam?’ She pinned him with tiny, piercing eyes, her mouth set in a straight red line. ‘Someone said you had.’

  Johnny opened the door. ‘How’s that any of your business?’ He spoke mildly but felt himself swept towards a spillway that dropped into a pool of white fury.

  ‘I just hope you’re happy,’ she said. ‘With what you did.’ She waited for him to reply but he was too busy trying not to spit in her face. If you were a bloke, he thought, holding on to the door as if the flood had doubled and he was hanging on for his life, I would rip your bloody head off.

  The fury he felt was volcanic. There was so much of it. It was a blackened battlefield, an earthen pit, a row of sealed steel coffins. So many people were involved, so many bad places, ugly sights and violent actions, that he stood silent, crushed by the load he had to carry away from that place. And because it was inexplicable, so heavy and involved, he became the fury.

  ‘Leave me—’ he punctured the air once with a stiff forefinger, ‘—alone.’ The woman walked away, Johnny watching her go, anger pounding his skull. Then he got into the car, found his cigarettes, which was the first miracle, and got one lit, which was the second. ‘Holy sheezus Christ.’ He sucked in smoke. ‘My bloody God.’

  He felt like a boxer who’d been flogged in a dirty fight. Set up by a bunch of bastards who’d left town on the first train. Who am I, he wondered? How can I be so hated? Yeah, hated by the Viets, those boys, I’ll wear that. But here? Don’t people realise how a raffle works? The army? Orders? The government? A war?

  ‘Just drive, idiot.’ He knew it was impossible to leave much behind, but he did know he could ditch the old bitch who still glared at him from the footpath, and that’d be a start. ‘Just get goin’.’

  This he managed, not caring that he was heading out of town on a meaningless road, doubting he could get any more lost than he already was. Then, as the trees grew higher and the hills got steeper, in a ferny hollow he saw a little pub called the Bellbird Hotel. He turned in.

  Seventeen

  Johnny walked into the empty bar of the hotel, sat on a stool, and looked at sepia photographs of bearded men standing on tree stumps. An upright piano faced the wall, the keys the colour of old horse teeth. Shoey lit a smoke. In the silence, he could feel his heart beating.

  The bush beyond the window was tangled and dense. Tree ferns held up open umbrellas of lime green. The leaves of vines shone like keyholes, giving glimpses into locked rooms. Further back, gu
mtrees speared skywards, bearing scabs of black that testified to bushfires long gone cold. Leeches in there, Johnny thought; little baby fellers, not like the big black bastards in Vietnam that left slime as they took blood.

  His anger at the woman in town, at himself, had subsided into purposelessness and fatigue. He looked out at the surrounding trees and thought of the boys never coming back from where they never should’ve gone. Where were the thanks? Where were the apologies, the better-late-than-never justifications? Even the scorecard was hidden. There were only reheated reasons, leaving the blokes who’d survived and the broken families of the dead with memories like anchors stuck in the past. And now, Shoey thought, this specially selected crew could haul on those anchors but they would not budge because you can’t go forward when your mates keep calling you back.

  A large woman in hip-hugging jeans came through a doorway hung with plastic streamers. She reached for beer taps like a crane driver reached for levers.

  ‘Sorry to keep ya, love,’ she said. ‘What’ll ya have?’

  ‘No problem.’ Johnny ordered a pot, guessing but not caring it was probably called a middie in New South Wales. He paid and sipped, the dark taste made sharper, flavoured with guilt, by the early hour. ‘I like the view.’

  The woman gazed at the bush.

  ‘Walk fifty yards in there,’ she said, ‘and you’d disappear. Tiger country, that. Get lost in a heartbeat.’

  Johnny could not see any threat. He saw an opening, the point of a leaf brushing his cheek as he entered. There would be the sponginess of rotted gum leaves and the cool perfume of eucalyptus. Overhead was the light of his childhood and beside him the shade would be welcome as sleep. Tiny birds would decorate tree trunks like ribbons in a kid’s hair. No weapon required.

  ‘Nothin’ to worry about in there.’ He managed a smile to show he wasn’t trying to be disagreeable. ‘Nothin’ to hurt ya.’

  ‘Ya reckon?’ The woman wasn’t convinced.

  In that bush Johnny saw a place to sit and just be. No people, no mines, no traps, no ambush, no well-aimed bullets, no fear twisting your guts . . . just a blank space where it was possible the worst things might leave you alone for a while.

  ‘I’ll be back in a tic.’ The woman turned away. ‘Give us a yell if you need anythin’.’

  Shoey thought about what he needed, and imagined the perfect girl, who might be more like Carly than Jilly. But what would he do with a girl that was any good anyway? Something in him had turned to stone. No, not stone. Something seemed to have simply gone bad. He could gently hold a pup but he couldn’t properly kiss a girl. What had gone wrong? He was back, safe and sound, wasn’t he? The killing was over. He’d committed no crime, kept his part of the bargain, did his duty more or less – but it didn’t seem to be making too much of a difference.

  ‘Nah, I’m right.’ He nearly laughed. Oh yeah, sport, you’re really all right.

  The woman left the bar, he thought, as if she was glad to be gone. Five minutes later he did the same. In the gravel car park he saw a red phone box boasting an old black telephone that looked to be in working condition. In his pocket he had coins.

  Johnny dialled Jilly’s number, the phone ringing in some old Carlton cottage that he imagined as being cramped and too close to the street. Probably raining, too, he thought, knowing Melbourne. Miraculously, she answered, her voice distant, breathy and cheerful, the coin dropping through the guts of the phone as if he was playing a poker machine.

  Johnny let the line clear then asked how she was. Well, she was fine. How, and where, was he? Johnny felt something catch in his heart, seeing the old, young Johnny Shoebridge in a red Miller shirt and Amco bull denim jeans disappearing around the milkbar corner, with Cam shambling along ten steps behind yelling for Shoey to wait. He wondered if Jilly saw him go.

  ‘New South Wales coast,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not runnin’ around with a rifle or anything. I’m okay.’ He heard her laugh. It was like a little dose of good medicine.

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. I doubted you’d be out shooting things. You’re all right, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’ He wanted to tell her that he loved her because he was pretty sure that he did, he just couldn’t find the place where he’d put that love. Maybe he’d just lost it, like a lot of things. Maybe if he sat quietly and thought back through the last couple of years he might find it, like a set of car keys left behind the teabags.

  ‘When are you coming to Melbourne, Johnny?’

  Johnny wasn’t sure whether that was an invitation or a warning to stay away. Yeah, he knew they had spun out of each other’s orbit, but he also knew she wasn’t a girl to give up that easily. People thought she was cute, curly-haired, and funny – but she was more than that. She was smart, independent, and determined. She’d grown up and wasn’t bound by anyone’s ideas. She’d left Taralia perhaps more completely than he had. Or needed it less.

  ‘Come as soon as you want to,’ she said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Be careful, John. You know, don’t climb any trees or swim too soon after lunch.’

  He laughed, surprising himself. ‘I won’t.’ He said goodbye and put the receiver down.

  Don’t climb any trees. Johnny liked that; something light and funny that only she would say and he would get. As he headed for the ute he pictured her putting on the kettle, fingers to her forehead, worrying as she wandered around some cramped kitchen with mismatched chairs. He also imagined the uni guys she’d know: clever, casual fellers with no blood on their hands, their futures like shiny railway lines that reached to the horizon, whereas my future, he thought, is more like a rusted train line that simply circles back to where it started from.

  Johnny drove out of the car park and over a dark, scrub-choked creek. Immediately it set him thinking about that guerrilla-fighting bastard Khan, and his AK. Endlessly he’d rise from the low jungle mist, step out of the bamboo, and try to put a bullet into Johnny’s head – or come after him hand-to-hand with that effing bayonet. But why? The war was over. If only the bastard would go away.

  ‘Yeah, go,’ Johnny muttered, wondering where, now, his enemy could.

  Jesus! Just away. It then occurred to Johnny, in a single shining moment, that if he could imagine Khan being here then why couldn’t he imagine him actually being somewhere else? If he allowed his enemy to embark upon a mission that was not to do with killing, perhaps that might allow the both of them to move a step closer to the end of the war. It might be the only way out, Johnny decided, since his chance of removing Khan from the real world was a chance that was gone forever.

  Johnny pictured Khan fishing on a reedy bank, a few simple bamboo rods poking out over the olive-green water. A sparse parade of sampans plied the river, loaded with everything from coconuts to sawn timber to piles of red and green chilli. A rowboat, Johnny saw, was moving downstream, piloted by Son. Johnny imagined a conversation.

  ‘Hey, Khan.’ Son feathered an oar in greeting. ‘It’s not a bad day to be out here.’ He changed course with a few deft strokes and allowed the boat to nose into the reeds. The oars stowed, he stepped ashore. ‘You know, my friend, I can take you to a better fishing spot. Just near my family’s vegetable gardens. There are eels there, too. Let’s pick up your gear. If you are interested.’

  Johnny saw that Khan couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse. Friendship was a hard thing to turn away from, unless you were a complete nutcase. So the good communist Khan and the bad communist Son put everything in the boat, and together headed out into midstream.

  ‘Smoke?’ Son pulled out a white pack of American Kent. ‘There’s tobacco or hash. Take your choice.’

  Charlie loved to smoke, Johnny knew that. And American cigarettes were favourites; bloody hard to get over there now, he figured, but available on the black market, like everything else.

  Khan took a plain cigarette. There was a wad of bank notes in the box.

  ‘No hash, Khan?’ Son shrugged. ‘It’s good.’ He laug
hed, produced the same lighter he had used last time they met. ‘It sells well.’

  Khan took a drag. ‘Hash gives me too many answers,’ he said. ‘None of them right.’ Son’s family, Johnny decided, had been quite wealthy before the war, his father high up in district affairs. This, most likely, had something to do with Son escaping the army. Maybe that’s where their fortune had gone, in buying their son’s life. It happened everywhere, but in communist Vietnam, Johnny figured, it was a most dangerous thing to do.

  Son plucked a bank note from a pocket. It was pale green, well-worn, and possessed a powerful and exotic aura.

  ‘An American dollar bill.’ He held it out to Khan. ‘Maybe it is from Texas or California.’

  Khan held the note in his fingertips, disconcerted by the unexpected image of a single eye staring out at him. It seemed a rather odd symbol to have come from America, he thought, as he imagined that country, like its soldiers, to simply be big, brash, obvious, and confident. Perhaps it was cursed, this dollar bill. He handed it back.

  ‘One day I will tell you, Son,’ Khan said, ‘about the battle for the fire base that Thang and Trung died in. Because I have never told anyone and it must be told.’

  I’d like to hear that, too, Johnny thought. Since I was there.

  Son nodded, rowing towards a small jetty, and a well-kept house. The smell of chickens was strong. Khan could see them strolling and scratching, pecking their way around a large vegetable garden.

  ‘I would be honoured,’ Son said. ‘Although I am not worthy and I know it.’

  ‘But you have honesty in your dealings with me.’ Khan felt this to be true and important and Johnny agreed. ‘That is not to be underestimated.’

  Son let the boat drift into the jetty. Deftly he stepped past Khan and looped a rope around a crooked pole.

  ‘We will eat,’ the trader said. ‘Then I will show you where to fish.’