So he sat and let the night slow-fall around him. A dark-haired girl, more of a kid, he thought, turned to him from another table.
‘Are you in the army, mate?’
Because Johnny had been drinking a lot, and the girl was young and sounded curious rather than angry, he presented her with a grin.
‘I was.’ He filled his glass with wine the colour of blood. ‘I was in the Foreign Legion.’
This kept her quiet and, Shoey decided, was about as close to the truth as she was ever going to get.
Khan and Son were back on the river. For a while they travelled in silence, a few sampans gliding past on the wide brown waterway.
‘We are not out of luck.’ Son’s face was shaded by a traditional woven hat that he wore as if to please or amuse Khan. ‘It is our turn for a change in fortune.’
Khan thought about the nature of luck. Was he lucky? Was Son lucky? Was the smiling girl luckier than the unconscious woman upstream? Who was lucky and who was not?
‘We are not un-lucky, Son,’ Khan said. ‘Are we?’
‘No.’ Son took the boat out into midstream. ‘We are rowing our own boat, Khan, and that is great. Now, my friend, there’s a village in the marshes where another wounded woman, supposedly from the north, supposedly called Phuong, lives. The place is strange and dangerous but I’m known there.’ Son smiled. ‘Perhaps they do not consider me a bad communist, Khan. Perhaps I do not see them as one thing or another, either, but only as people.’
‘They’re not the enemy, anyway,’ Khan said, feeling quite within his rights to make this statement. ‘The country is now united.’
Son put in a few slow, thoughtful strokes. ‘Well, they aren’t the enemy anymore. So the story goes.’
There are enemies everywhere, boys, Johnny thought. Just as there are friends and allies. Of course, this can change depending on who you run into and when, how you view yesterday, and what you hope for tomorrow.
Forty-six
Johnny, fairly drunk, wove through a wet and windy grid of Carlton streets, hoping to stumble upon Cardigan Place or Street or whatever it was called. In an effort to orientate himself, to think straight, he took shelter in the narrow tiled doorway of a small hardware shop. In the window was an amateurish display of bamboo rakes, folded overalls, gumboots, camping chairs, plastic cases of Stanley screwdrivers, and an arrangement of red Victorinox Swiss pocketknives, blades open.
‘Ah,’ Johnny said, sitting on the step, folding his arms, ‘just what I don’t need. A knife.’
For a while he watched cars pushing on up the road and listened to the sounds of a soaked city. There was hardly anyone around. For a bloody big place, he thought, everyone seemed to go to bed mighty early.
‘Newsflash, folks!’ he yelled into the dark. ‘We lost the war! Charlie got the chocolates!’ Fumbling, he lit a smoke, and took a drag. ‘Your taxes at work! God save America!’ His head, he felt, was either completely full or totally empty, he couldn’t work out which. ‘No one fuckin’ cares anyway,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t.’
The cracks were starting to widen now. They were opening up wherever he looked. He was by himself, walking point in tiger country with no map, no weapon, no back-up, no escape route, and no plan – and it did not get much worse than that.
In the shade of the only tree in the marsh village, Khan saw a woman in white. She sat with her back to him and her head covered.
‘On your way, friend.’ Gently Son pushed Khan forward with fingers in the middle of his back. ‘I will wait here. Take my best wishes and highest hopes.’
Khan went forward over the bare ground. ‘Sister Phuong.’ He spoke gently from a polite distance. ‘My name is Khan and I am looking for a friend from the north—’
The woman turned and Khan stopped, seeing that she had been shockingly burned. Her face appeared to have melted, the flesh healed in sagging pink pools. He could also see that she was blind, and that the burns extended down her throat until they were hidden by the white silk of her ao dai. Her hands were twisted and most of her fingers were missing. Napalm, he thought. No, worse than that. White phosphorous.
‘Khan?’ She focused on the source of the voice. ‘Khan, did you say?’ Her voice was a croaking whisper. ‘From Lang Song in the north?’
‘Yes.’ Khan found he had sunk to his knees. This woman was Phuong. Yes, she was injured beyond belief but it was her, his great friend, his love, his comrade-in-arms, living in this strange, strange place. Carefully he took hold of one of her hands. ‘It is me, Khan. Yes.’
Phuong turned over his hand. With a single finger she traced the hard skin of his palm.
‘I am not the Phuong you used to know.’ She raised her ruined face. ‘I think that’s obvious.’
‘Yes, I see,’ Khan answered. ‘I am not the same Khan, either. No one is the same and no place is the same. But Son and I will take you home. If you would like to come.’
Phuong did not relinquish Khan’s hand. ‘The people here have been very kind. I owe them, and many others, my life. But I would very much like to go home with you and Son.’ She stopped talking, as if to listen to a breath of wind that moved through the marsh grasses. ‘And to see Trung and Thang. That would be beautiful.’
‘Yes, it would be.’ Khan felt himself lifted, just for a moment. ‘It would be the most perfect thing I can imagine.’ Johnny felt this was true. Things like this did happen. People who were lost were found, especially if others had not ever given up looking for them. It happened and so it should. And he was sure it had.
Forty-seven
The 727 accelerated for take-off, a rapid rumbling in Shoey’s stomach that was suddenly replaced by a shifting weightlessness as the world dropped away. The big jet banked determinedly to the south and the boys cheered. Young Pete threw himself across a grinning soldier to shout at a sunlit window.
‘Sayonara, Charlie! See yers later, suckers! We are goin’ home!’
Khan was helped from the trapdoor into the early morning by the new doctor who had glowing golden skin. She handed him his AK, complete with bayonet. The weapon had been cleaned, oiled, and loaded.
‘Good luck, Khan.’ Her fingertips rested softly on his arm. ‘You have a long journey in front of you. Please accept our thanks for your sacrifices on behalf of the people. You know which way to go, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do, doctor. Thank you.’ The cool air caressed Khan’s face. It made him smile. The clearing was green, loosely bordered by tall bamboo, as restful on his eyes as if he was looking at a pool of rainwater. ‘Thank you.’ He bowed and smiled. The small pack he carried felt good on his back. His AK he cradled like a sleeping baby. ‘I shall go north, sister. And home.’
I wish you luck, Johnny thought, you one-armed wreck, because the fighting is over and although your story might not be exactly true, it is true enough. And at this point, as we get older, perhaps we can hope that how things should be might actually be how things are.
Johnny sat in the shadowed doorway and lit his last cigarette. A grey drizzle drifted, adding a sense of desolation to the darkness, diluting the lights until they seemed to shine only in puddles. The place was not silent but it was quiet.
‘Well,’ he murmured, sensing that the old buildings opposite offered fellowship for those whom the world was rapidly passing by. ‘Here I am. Like a shag on a rock. Except I can’t fly.’
The cigarette he was smoking felt like a fuse and his head a box of dynamite. He didn’t know what would happen when he finished it or where he would go. All he hoped was that he didn’t scare the women who occasionally walked past, because scaring anyone was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.
‘I’m harmless,’ he murmured. ‘To everybody but me.’
He looked at the stuff in the window, the place so badly lit it was as if no one expected or cared whether anything would ever be bought or sold. For long seconds he gazed at the pale tines of the bamboo rakes, a weight suddenly falling on him as the silver blades of the red poc
ketknives began to spin, and he found himself right back in the bloody middle of the second fire base battle, watching a terrible silent movie, a retreating Main Force fighter clear in the sights of his SLR.
In slow-motion, in the light of a magnesium flare, Johnny remembered firing twice, saw the fighter’s arm burst at the elbow and a fistful of flesh fly from his side. In the white air an AK spun, bayonet glinting, a Russian AKM bayonet, and Johnny knew – he absolutely knew that he had not dreamed or imagined this – that the fighter he’d shot was the real, true-to-life, enemy bastard Khan.
Johnny remembered the man kneeling, right arm hanging, elbow blown apart, blood pouring from his side as if from a split hose. He remembered sighting on the fighter’s bowed head but he had pulled the shot, deliberately fired low and wide, knowing he’d made the decision not to kill a wounded man, and that was how it had been.
That was how it had been.
Yes, that was how it had been.
‘Farrrk.’ Johnny slumped into the corner and sucked hard on his smoke. ‘I spared you, you prick.’ He smiled widely at the dark. ‘I did. You don’t own me, sport. I spared you.’ He took the last hot drag of his last Marlboro and flicked the butt. ‘We’re even. I’m okay. I’m all right. I spared you.’ Tears of happiness, or relief, or both, spilled over his fingers, leaving him gulping like a kid in the corner of a cubbyhouse in Taralia a long time ago. ‘I did not dream that.’ Johnny shook his head in stunned wonder. ‘I did not dream that.’ His voice tailed away to a whisper. ‘That is true.’
Maybe he woke up. Maybe he’d never been asleep. Maybe he’d been away. Maybe he hadn’t moved, but Johnny was somewhat surprised to find he was still in the draughty doorway of a small hardware shop in Carlton, in Melbourne, it was still raining, and it was probably the same night. Without a single thought in his head he watched a girl in a duffel coat the colour of Indian ink draw level on the footpath. She stopped, holding the hood to the sides of her face with pale hands.
‘Is that you, Johnny Shoebridge?’
It was the second time for the day, he realised, that he’d been asked this rather difficult question.
‘Yeah, it’s me, Jilly.’ He stood, hoping with each step taken that when he got to the footpath she’d be real, and she was. Between them, instantly, was some kind of fine musical humming. ‘That was good work, kid.’ For once he couldn’t help but smile. ‘How’d you—’
Jilly let her hood fall back, misty rain sifting down through the silver light of the street to dampen her nose and cheeks. Then she laughed, eyes shining, and circled his wrist with firm wet fingers.
‘I saw your stupid ute.’ She shrugged as if she was not at all surprised that this had happened. ‘So I went looking. And here you are. Bingo.’
Johnny could only agree. Everything about her that he had loved was there and strengthened.
‘Yep. Here I am. Bingo.’ He found himself holding her, and knew he had made it across a certain line. ‘You did well, mate. Real well. Even in the rain and dark.’
‘Even in the rain and dark.’ She laughed, and it was as if the two of them were grade-sixers again, folk dancing under the old white flagpole at Taralia State. ‘So. Coming back to my house? It’s just up there.’ She pointed to silver tram tracks that crested a rise. ‘It’s got an open fire and a tin roof. I’m sure you’ll like it.’
‘I’m sure I will.’ He took hold of her hand and brought it forward and up. ‘Lead the way.’
And away, together, they walked.
About the author
David Metzenthen lives in and loves Melbourne. He was an advertising copywriter and a builder’s labourer before turning to fiction. He tries to surf, fly-fish, and is a keen environmentalist. The natural world is where he likes to spend his time, and he endeavours to write books that are thoughtful and well-crafted. David is married to Fiona, has two children, two parrots, and a great Irish Terrier dog.
Also by David Metzenthen
One Minute’s Silence
Tigerfish
Jarvis 24
Black Water
Winning the World Cup: Aussie Nibbles
Tiff and the Trout
Boys of Blood and Bone
Stony Heart Country
Dreaming the Enemy Page 20