by Carl Nixon
Elizabeth pokes with her fork at the colourless, slimy cabbage on her plate. It is true that everyone in the house is headstrong. Inevitably there are frequent clashes. ‘Maybe not.’
‘This job is an opportunity, Lizzy. I don’t see why you shouldn’t grab it with both hands.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You do that. Now go tell those two boys that dinner’s on the table. Let your father know it’s kidneys tonight — that should hurry him along.’
twelve
Elizabeth has seven photographs of Jack’s father. As with the days of the week, they are endlessly recycled. While other children have Peter Rabbit or the fables of Aesop before bedtime, Jack has these photographs. Through almost daily repetition, the story behind each one has assumed the familiarity of litany. Elizabeth hardly has to speak now; Jack can tell her the stories.
The boy always shuffles the photographs before he begins. He prides himself on being able to interpret each one, no matter what order it appears in.
The beach picture is slightly larger than the others and sits unevenly in his hands, corners out of alignment. Jack is orderly by temperament and training. He taps and jiggles the photograph into place before he begins.
‘In this one, Daddy is young, but older than I am now. That other person is Uncle Roger. They’re wearing their best clothes.’
‘That’s right,’ says Elizabeth. ‘They look very smart.’
‘In this one you and Daddy have just got married. You’re both wearing uniforms. You didn’t have a proper wedding dress because of the war but you still look pretty and Daddy looks handsome.
‘In this one you’re smiling because you’re married now. The man with the broken leg was your marriage witness.
‘Daddy and you are in a big city called London. You were both on leaving.’
‘On leave,’ says Elizabeth. ‘That’s like a short holiday away from the army.’
‘On leave. That tall statue is of another soldier, a ship soldier—’
‘Lord Nelson. He was an admiral in the English navy.’
Jack scowls. He doesn’t like being interrupted when he is telling the photographs’ stories. ‘The statue is up high. It always has lots of pigeons around it like that. It’s only Dad in this one because you took the picture.
‘In this one these are some of his friends in the war. They’re wearing war uniforms and that is his artillery gun for shooting shells a long way.
‘This last one isn’t a very good picture of you and Daddy. It was taken at the train station when he was about to go back to the war after you were married. He looks sad and you aren’t even looking at the camera.’
The seven photographs are a mixture of studio portraits and pictures taken on the Pocket Camera that travelled with Jack’s father to the war — ‘the soldier’s camera’, as the advertising of the day called it. The photographs allow the boy only imperfect glimpses into the past. Elizabeth is aware that her son will soon want to know more.
She has told Jack the facts.
His father was sent on patrol with three other men. They were ordered to scout for enemy soldiers in a forest in France. It was very near the end of the war and the Germans had been in retreat but were holding the nearby town, which had high stone walls around it, like a castle. His father’s patrol left after midnight and was expected back the next morning.
‘And then what happened?’ Jack had asked.
Elizabeth doesn’t know.
She has been left with an absence of story. She feels as if she were at a performance of a Greek drama. Offstage, armies clash, heroic duels are fought, storms blow and the gods’ capricious whims are enacted. She has waited and waited. But the sounds from the wings have long ago faded. The other people in the audience have shuffled away with apologetic glances in her direction.
She still sits in the darkened auditorium waiting for the play to conclude. There is, however, no sign of a messenger; no last surviving member of the three hundred has turned up mortally wounded, to gasp out his tale.
But how do you explain that to a four-year-old?
Undoubtedly there are some mothers who would have spelt out the hard facts, laid out the slim odds and the dire possibilities under a harsh light, one by one.
There’s a good chance that your father is dead. You’ll almost certainly never see him again.
Elizabeth has considered that approach but she is loath to leave Jack to the mercy of the facts, which are limited, and doubt. She doesn’t believe that facts and doubt are a suitable foundation on which her son should be expected to build a decent life.
That is why she has, slowly, hesitantly at first, unsure if she is doing the right thing, but then with growing confidence, begun filling the emptiness with a story.
It began on Jack’s fourth birthday.
She tucked him into bed, turned out the lights, and at the point when she would usually kiss him on the forehead and slip from the room, she sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness. Jack turned his face to her expectantly.
She spoke slowly but with certainty, as though she had heard this story before, as if she knew how it proceeded and how it would end.
Once there was a man who went away in a hot air balloon. He waved goodbye to his family as he lifted off. He promised them that he would be back in exactly one year. The balloon drifted up and up and up and soon they were so far away that they looked like black ants way down, far below him.
That’s how the story started. That was the very first telling.
As is true with many stories, it began with something familiar. Jack had recently seen a weather balloon being launched from a park close to where he lived. He had been on an outing with his grandmother and Elizabeth had heard all about it when she came home. Also, like most boys of that age, he was fascinated by the insects in the garden, particularly by ants.
Don’t imagine that the story was as polished on that first day as it appears when written down. Of course I’m surmising: there is no transcript of that first rough draft. But undoubtedly the story would have been a clumsy soup of half-cooked words and ideas. That’s just how first drafts are, even more so if they’re spoken.
But Jack seemed satisfied when, after just a few minutes, Elizabeth said, ‘It’s late and you’re tired.’ She would tell him some more of the story another night if he wanted.
‘All right.’
For the next two nights, Jack did not mention the story. Elizabeth was relieved. She had come to question the wisdom of her approach. She was uncertain about her ability to string together a coherent story, let alone one that would give her son something to cling to in an ocean of doubt.
And then three nights later, as Jack was pulling on his pyjamas, he said, ‘I liked that story.’
‘Which one?’ she asked, although she knew.
‘The one about the man and the balloon. Tell me some more.’
‘Tell me some more, please.’
‘Please.’
Elizabeth found it necessary to go back, repeating the start as best she could recall. She found herself refining and polishing the words so that they flowed, and better expressed what she hoped to say.
Once there was a man who left his family so that he could go and explore the world in a hot air balloon. He wore a special balloonist’s uniform of blue and red and looked very smart and handsome as he waved goodbye to his wife and his young son. As the balloon lifted off from the ground, the man called out to them, repeating his promise that he would be back in exactly one year. The ground fell away beneath him as the balloon carried him up into the sky. Soon his little house, his wife and his boy were all so distant that they looked like black ants far, far below. And then they were lost from his view.
Over the weeks since his birthday the telling of this story has become a comforting routine. Elizabeth always sits on the edge of the bed, the light turned off, the door open a crack so there is just enough light for her to see Jack’s face. He is generally still and silent,
an audience only known by its breathing, or through small murmurs of wonder or sympathy. Sometimes Jack will ask her to stop. He rolls over onto his tummy and reaches for the glass of water on the chair next to his bed.
‘Not too much or you’ll need to go in the dark.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ he protests.
Jack doesn’t request the story every night. Sometimes it will be a full week before he asks for it again. Occasionally, there will be a flurry of story nights, three or four in a row.
Elizabeth often starts by repeating what she has told him in the last instalment. Sometimes she will even go right back to the start of the story and in a few succinct sentences sum up the entire tale to date. Jack does not seem to mind the repetition. He is content just to listen.
There are other bedtime stories as well. She reads to Jack books borrowed from the Mansfield Children’s Library, a brick building near the centre of the city. Jack finds some of these stories original and enthralling. Many, however, are less so. The Balloonist, as she comes to call her story, is the only one Elizabeth has the energy or motivation to make up.
The Balloonist is requested regularly enough that it becomes a fixture in their lives. Every time the story is told, a little more is added until it is populated with a number of different characters. There is an African named Mboli, whom the Balloonist first met when the tribesman was falling off a waterfall, over which he had been chased by an enraged white rhinoceros. The Balloonist had plucked him to safety. Mboli was a clumsy chap and often needed rescuing. (This was 1919. People whose skin was anything less than white often found themselves taking secondary roles in fiction — just as they did in colonial societies.)
Jack also likes the character of Dougal MacTavish, who chanced his way into the Balloonist’s company while fleeing from the clutches of pirates whom he owed money. What a whisky-drinking, bumbling laugh the red-nosed Scotsman turned out to be.
As she walks to and from the hospital, Elizabeth finds herself thinking about directions the story could take. Her mind sifts through the possibilities, even as she performs the tasks that are part of her daily routine.
On the evening of the day when Elizabeth first meets Paul Blackwell, this is what she adds to The Balloonist.
thirteen
After many adventures, the Balloonist found himself flying high over a land of jungles. Or perhaps it was just one jungle; it was impossible to tell. The trees stretched in every direction as far as he could see. It was early morning and the sun had just risen above the green horizon to the east. Both Mboli and Dougal MacTavish were asleep in their hammocks in the section of the large basket separated by a blanket strung on a rope and under cover of a roof of banana-tree leaves that Mboli had fashioned. MacTavish was snoring loudly.
Peering over the edge of the basket, the Balloonist could occasionally see clearings among the trees. In some there were villages with huts of mud and roofs made of leaves. In one village he observed a naked child jump back in alarm as the balloon’s shadow passed close to her feet. The child looked up and began to shout. Soon people were hurrying out from the huts. They pointed excitedly to where the balloon drifted in the sky. Some of the men threw spears and the Balloonist was glad when the breeze carried the balloon over the treetops and out of sight.
Later that day, he saw thousands of brightly coloured birds roosting in the tops of the giant trees. Startled by the balloon, the birds all took off at the same time and flew just below the basket. The flock was so thick that the Balloonist imagined he could step right out of the basket and walk across their backs just as you or I might walk over a brightly coloured rug. Of course he did not do that. As you will know, the carpet of birds would not have supported his weight and he could have fallen right through them to his death in the jungle below.
A flash of lightning arced across the sky. The boom of thunder was so close that it shook the basket. The man looked up from the birds and was surprised to see that a storm had suddenly sprung up in front of him. Storms near the equator — for that is where he now was — are not at all like the storms we have here in Mansfield. They do not gather slowly, allowing children time to come in from their games or giving mothers a chance to bring in their washing from the clothesline. In the tropics, storms leap out like a big black dog appearing from behind a bush. You always have to be on your guard.
Churning clouds stretched from the top of the trees to the tip of the sky. Within minutes the storm had overtaken the balloon, sucked it in, swallowed it whole; basket, men, supplies and all. Inside the clouds it was as dark as night. The howling wind blew rain into the Balloonist’s face and shook the basket so hard that it was as if the storm were intent on tossing him out. The thunder was close enough to rattle his teeth. Somewhere behind him he heard Dougal MacTavish fall out of his hammock and curse loudly. There was the sound of breaking glass. MacTavish cursed louder still at the loss of his last bottle of whisky.
The man peered over the edge of the basket. He could not see more than a few feet so did not know if the howling wind had pushed them high or low.
As it turned out, the storm had chosen to drive the balloon downwards. The man discovered this when a branch flicked by in the darkness. And then another and another. They were flying through the treetops. Desperately he began to throw out the heavy sandbags from the bottom of the basket. Normally this would make the basket rise, but it was already too late. The storm had them in an iron grip. The basket hit a wall of branches and somehow drove through. The Balloonist had a fleeting glimpse of a startled family of orangutans as he shot past, close enough that he could have reached out a hand and stroked their long auburn hair.
And then came the sound that he had been dreading.
Riiiiiiiip.
He looked up and saw a gaping, flapping tear in the silk of the balloon. The only thing that he could do as the basket began to crash down through the trees was throw himself onto the wicker floor where he was flung around like a ball, his stomach in his mouth.
The basket plummeted through the jungle canopy. Sometimes it held up for a moment. But mostly it bounced and crashed and shuddered from one branch to another. At long last it seemed to be over when the tattered silk and the ropes snagged and the basket hung in the air. Looking up, the man saw that they were caught on a thick branch and breathed a sigh of relief. But before he could even stagger to his feet a rope snapped, the whole basket tilted and slid and began to fall again.
Finally, with a terrible thump, it hit the floor of the jungle.
The Balloonist felt something hard strike his head. Or possibly his head struck something hard: it was difficult to tell, given all the noise and the confusion. Either way, that was the last thing he knew for a long time.
fourteen
In the week after her first encounter with Paul Blackwell, Elizabeth isn’t herself. In the typically imprecise way of idiom, that’s not to say that she has become another person, but simply that she’s distracted.
Everyone notices.
Her mother tut-tuts when Elizabeth burns the toast. Her father mumbles affectionate platitudes when he discovers her standing on the back lawn staring vacantly into the distance, her brow creased, only half the wrung washing on the clothesline. He pats her reassuringly on the shoulder with a hand caked in manured earth from the vegetable patch.
The men in Ward Six also notice but they have other things to think about. One of their number, Ian Webster — Webby, Webs — for so long a patient that he finds clothes other than his hospital pyjamas completely alien, is finally being discharged.
He is being released into the care of his mother. Anyone who has seen them together couldn’t help doubting whether their relationship is going to be harmonious. Mrs Webster is a sagging woman with a flat nose and eyes like two dark raisins firmly pushed into the doughy flesh of her face. During her frequent visits to the ward she habitually leans over her son’s bed, keeping up a steady stream of endearments and encouragement more suited to a five year old learning to swim th
an a man who has spent a considerable portion of his young life manning a Vickers machine gun. (It is worth noting that mothering is only a single sibilant slip away from smothering.)
In May 1919 the world is looking for any excuse to push the recent war to the back of its collective consciousness and kick up its heels. To celebrate Ian Webster’s discharge the men of Ward Six are throwing a party. They spend that whole week preparing, gathering together the ingredients for cake and biscuits, which the kitchen staff have agreed to bake. There will be beer and gin; not sanctioned by the nurses but not explicitly forbidden either. Other small luxuries appear via friends and family. The men make paper hats out of newspaper and paint them blue and red. On Friday they decorate the ward for that evening’s festivities. A line of red and blue bunting is hung over the doorway. A banner is placed along the wall above the windows on the north side of the room — GOOD LUCK WEBBY. Real balloons are in short supply so cardboard imitations have been cut out and painted festive colours. They are tied in two-dimensional bunches to the bed-heads.
When everything is ready the men help each other with buttons and belts where a missing hand or chronic trembling means that someone is unable. They joke as they wrestle with Windsor knots and the awkward bows in shoe laces.
Elizabeth stays after her shift so that she can attend.
At 4.30 the gramophone is cranked up and Al Jolson sings. He is followed by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and by six o’clock the party is in full swing. Someone has spiked the punch with gin. Nobody minds. Half a dozen of the other nurses from the hospital have come. They laugh and talk with the men, who show off and make jokes that sometimes sail close to the wind.