My Beautiful Enemy

by Cory Taylor

  Praise for Cory Taylor and Me and Mr Booker

  ‘One of the best coming-of-age novels I’ve ever read…

  Me and Mr Booker is sexy, smart and brutally funny, and reminds us that while teenagers grow up fast, it’s only because they’re surrounded by adults who behave like children.’ Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law

  ‘Restrained, surprisingly moving and compulsively readable, Cory Taylor’s debut novel is a nuanced and touching portrait of a doomed relationship.’ Sun Herald

  ‘Cory Taylor’s characters are magnificently created.’

  Weekend Australian

  ‘One of the most assured debut novels I have ever read.’

  Krissy Kneen, author of Affection

  ‘Distinctive, disturbing and refreshed by the limitless aptitude of middle-aged men for acting like spoilt teenagers. A vibrant, questioning and unpredictable read.’ West Australian

  ‘ Sharply observed and blackly comic, but it is also a tender depiction of love, sex, power and one girl’s heartbreaking step into adulthood.’

  Australian Bookseller + Publisher

  ‘Taylor’s no-nonsense voice and eagle eye will assure her of many readers of all ages.’ Age

  ‘Understated and memorable.’ Canberra Times

  ‘An assured debut.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Controlled and elegant.’ David Vann, author of Dirt

  Cory Taylor is an award-winning screenwriter who has also published short fiction and children’s books. She is the Pacific Region Winner of The Commonwealth Book Prize for her first novel, Me and Mr Booker. She lives in Brisbane and Japan.

  MY

  BEAUTIFUL

  ENEMY

  CORY

  TAYLOR

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House 22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  My Beautiful Enemy © copyright Cory Taylor 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall 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 permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2013

  Cover design by W. H. Chong

  Page design by Text

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press, an accredited ISO/NZS 1401:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry :

  Author: Taylor, Cory, 1955-

  Title: My beautiful enemy / by Cory

  ISBN: 9781922079893 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9781921961618 (ebook)

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  for Shin

  Why is the measure of love loss?

  Jeanette Winterson

  1

  Everybody has dreams about the life they might have led. For years I mourned the life I could have shared with Stanley if only the times had been different. I blamed my unhappiness on the war, and then I blamed it on my wives. Now I see that I was unhappy for the same reasons that everyone else, at one time or another, is unhappy. We define ourselves by what we do not have, by the people we are not, and we do this because we must.

  When I think back on the man himself, on the real Stanley, as opposed to the imaginary one, I discover that I hardly knew him. I gleaned a little about his early life, and also something about his temperament. But beyond that he was a mystery to me, and therein lay his fascination. In my deluded state back then I imagined I’d found a twin soul. Of course, like a lot of other people, I was blinded by his beauty. In the handful of photographs I’ve kept of him I can still see it. He stares out of them almost miserably, as if his loveliness is an affliction. Not that I saw it that way, at least not in the beginning. In the beginning I thought it was a kind of miracle.

  I met Stanley in the autumn of 1945 at Tatura, a camp for Japanese enemy aliens, where I was stationed as a guard. My first sight of the camp one wet Sunday morning in April had convinced me that my fortunes could sink no lower. It looked like the sleepy place of exile it was: rows and rows of tin and timber army huts arranged in four compounds centring on a parade ground the size of a football pitch, the whole fortress encircled by two fences one inside the other, both topped with rolls of rusted barbed wire. I remember passing through the main gates, my kit slung over my shoulder, and wondering if there hadn’t been some terrible mistake. A sheep paddock in the backblocks, a hundred odd miles from Melbourne, was not where I’d planned to take my stand against the enemy. I’d imagined going into battle in some exotic foreign field and mowing down the evil foe before emerging bloodied but triumphant in the dawn light; following my labours there’d be love and laughter and peace ever after, if Vera Lynn was to be believed.

  I was seventeen years old and still smarting from the comments my instructor had made after my dismissal from the Air Force the previous Christmas. He said I was a good pilot but I lacked character. It was the sort of observation people had been making about me all my life, so I assumed it must be true. Nevertheless the Air Force had been my one chance to redeem myself through acts of true heroism, and the loss of this opportunity had made me bitter to say the least.

  I wish I could tell you that things improved after I joined the army, except that the opposite is true. By the time I arrived at Tatura I was so full of self-righteous rage it was laughable. I had hated the army from the start, because it wasn’t the Air Force, and because three weeks into my basic training at the Bonegilla barracks, a couple of hours’ drive from Tatura, a recurrence of a childhood illness loosely described as ‘weak nerves’ had relegated me to non-combat tasks with no heroic overtones and not a hint of glamour. I also despised the uniform, which was drab and ill-fitting and didn’t flatter anyone who wore it. In my case it made me look green and underfed, like a sickly calf. That this bothered me at all was a measure of my vanity back then. I was the kind of boy who takes everything personally and is over-sensitive to appearances, and Stanley was the same. I believe we had that much in common at least, even if everything else was just a matter of me presuming to know things that were way beyond my comprehension.

  Half a lifetime later Stanley would tell me, with a kindly smile, that I imagined he was someone he wasn’t. He seemed to be suggesting that I’d misunderstood his actions and exaggerated their significance.

  ‘I never think about the past,’ he said in his matinee-idol voice. ‘It’s over and done with.’

  I confessed that for me it was different, and that I dwelled in the past more and more. I told Stanley that for some years now, I’d felt as if my real life had ended when I’d left Tatura, and everything after that had been a posthumous life.

  ‘I remember the whole thing as if it was yesterday,’ I said.

  ‘Poor Arthur,’ said Stanley and then he took hold of my hand the same way he had when we were boys, lacing his fingers through mine and squeezing so hard it hurt.

  Stanley had turned up one night in the middle of May, after I’d been at the camp for little more than a month. I was in the infirmary at the time, suffering the same debilitating headaches and stomach cramps that had made me unfit for active duty. Matron Conlon had confirmed the army doctor’s diagnosis. Nerves she said. I needed to learn to relax. To that end she’d installed me in a two-bed ward behind her office where I was to be the sole occupant for as long as it took me to calm down.

  Corporal Riley had brought Stanley in after he’d fronted up at the main gate demanding to be let inside. I remember the rai
n was drumming so hard on the loose tin of the infirmary roof that it was a while before I heard Riley banging on the door. I was the only one awake at the time so I had to let them in through the laundry next to Matron Conlon’s office. I’d got into the habit of reading late into the night on a little closed-in section of the back verandah where there was a moth-eaten sofa and chairs and a small library of paperbacks and schoolbooks, whatever came in by way of donations from the Red Cross. It was in the cosy seclusion of this corner that I’d become such a devoted fan of Hemingway’s. I believed him when he said that once we have a war there is only one thing to be done. It must be won.

  Corporal Riley and Stanley came in out of the storm and waited in the hallway while I went to wake Matron. I remember when we came back Stanley stood to attention and saluted Matron Conlon with a ridiculous flourish, then stared at me with a cool expression as if he’d already decided not to like me. I don’t know why this hurt me as much as it did, since I’d only just laid eyes on him and his opinion should have meant nothing to me. I can only think that I was already under his spell.

  ‘Stanley Ueno,’ said Matron, chiding him as if this was just the latest in a long string of misdemeanours. When she made no move to introduce me I stepped forward and squared my shoulders.

  ‘Private Arthur Wheeler,’ I said.

  Without replying, Stanley removed his hat and pushed his damp hair back off his forehead. The first thing you noticed about him was the severity of his features: the eyebrows, nose, full mouth, cheekbones, all cleanly drawn, the overall impression being that his face had been carved with some ideal notion of youth in mind. With his ivory skin and hooded eyes he was by far the handsomest boy I’d ever seen. It almost hurt to look at him, mainly because I would never again be able to take comfort in the common wisdom that the Japs were unlovely. In an instant I’d been converted to a new faith, which said beauty was a rare thing and something to be worshipped unreservedly. I was like a blind man who has suddenly been given the gift of sight, and it struck me that I was in the presence of something wondrous.

  ‘The prodigal son returns,’ Riley said to Matron, and then they both stood back and admired him in the manner of proud parents, although the very idea was ludicrous. Matron stood five feet tall and plumply pink all over and Riley had the big-boned heftiness of a carthorse. Stanley, beside them, seemed so princely I had a momentary urge to bow or kneel down before him to show my devotion.

  I gathered that Riley and Matron were both glad to see Stanley back, that there’d been some genuine fears for his safety after he’d been reported missing from his Ballarat school. And so I was glad too, without really knowing the reason. At the same time I was still not used to the way Riley and some of the others seemed to regard the Japs as harmless and the camp as a benign institution meant to promote the general welfare of the inmates. I was even baffled by the idea that Jap kids could be let out of the camp to go to school, just as if they were normal kids.

  To my way of thinking the Japs were the enemy, before they were individual men, women and children, and that was something never to be forgotten. In those days I was still something of a fanatic and held to the conventional fanatical view that all the local Japanese from places like Broome and Darwin had been locked up out of necessity, as a defence against spy activity and sabotage. I also believed that they weren’t strictly human, which was a common enough opinion back then. Either you saw them as superhuman fighting machines, or as primitive beasts, but never as ordinary people.

  I felt sorry for Matron Conlon, whose gentleness towards anyone in her care, whether one of us or one of them, had struck me already as foolish.

  ‘They feel the same pain we feel,’ she told me. ‘We’re all God’s children.’

  I dismissed this view as soon as I heard it because it didn’t explain the savagery of the Japanese soldiers I’d read about in the papers, who famously liked to behead their captives with swords or swing enemy babies against the nearest stone wall to crush their skulls. Matron Conlon, I decided, had gone soft in the brain from too much gin; either that or her Irish sentimentality had led her seriously astray.

  She motioned for Stanley to come with her into the six-bed ward on the far side of my reading room and I followed, alarmed in case she was planning to let him stay there. By then I’d come to regard the empty infirmary as my private quarters. I remember watching Stanley walk ahead of me, and admiring the way he moved, catlike, with his head held still as if he was on the lookout for prey. Later he told me he’d been so hungry out on the road that he’d tried to hunt and fish. He said if he hadn’t been so bad at it he might never have come back to the camp. He might still be out there living in a cave somewhere like a savage. I told him I thought he was better off where he was, fed and clothed and where his family could look out for him, but he turned to me with that cool expression of his and said I had no idea what I was talking about.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ I asked Riley, who was sticking close by Stanley and Matron in case there was anything he could do to help.

  ‘Ran away,’ said Riley. ‘Boarding school not to his liking.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said, still confused about Stanley’s history.

  Riley took hold of my arm and spoke to me in a conspirator’s whisper, as if he didn’t want Matron to hear.

  ‘I wouldn’t hand any child of mine over to the Christian Brothers if my life depended on it. Bunch of kiddie fiddlers.’

  His hot breath in my ear made me blush. I worried that Riley might have divined just by looking at me how dim I was about the appetites of men, that he might be offering this as a kind of caution.

  In the meantime Matron was examining Stanley under the light, peering at his pupils. She made him open his mouth so she could see his tongue, and then she felt around the base of his ears and under his chin.

  Riley let go of my arm and busied himself lighting a fag. He reached out and offered Stanley a puff. We all watched while he put the cigarette to his lips and took a deep drag, his pleasure apparent in the way he closed his eyes and let his head tip back.

  ‘You want me to tell the family you’re home?’ Riley said. ‘Or do you want to surprise them?’

  Here it was again, that way of referring to Japs as if they were just like anyone else, acting familiar with them. Stanley didn’t say anything. Under the brighter light now I could see how tired he was, how close to collapse, and I had a momentary urge to speak myself, to say something comforting. But since I’d made such a point of keeping my distance from the Japs I couldn’t very well change tack now, in front of Riley and Matron, even if my heart had effectively melted inside me.

  Matron Conlon stared down at Stanley’s wrecked school shoes and made a hissing sound with her tongue.

  ‘Those must be blocks of ice,’ she said.

  Stanley looked down at his feet and seemed about to swoon. Riley noticed and, leaping to his side, took hold of the boy’s coat sleeve to keep him upright. And then Stanley stared at me again and I blushed more deeply than I had before, because his gaze was so brazen, and because out of my uniform I felt stripped of authority.

  That was the other thing about Stanley. It wasn’t just his beauty that was so disturbing, but also his refusal to kowtow to anyone. In my first few weeks at the camp, I’d observed for myself how obedient the internees were, almost to the point of servility. But Stanley was different. I discovered later that, although born in Japan, he’d been partly raised by a family in Chicago. I imagined some Chicago public school was where he’d picked up his American swagger and his habit of appearing fearless even when he was quaking in his boots. It was the unflinching face he presented to the world and it fooled most of the people most of the time.

  I call him a boy but he wasn’t really. He was as solidly built as Riley and bursting out of his school clothes so that the blazer buttonholes gaped.

  ‘Let’s get you out of those filthy things,’ said Matron Conlon and proceeded to strip Stanley down whil
e Riley helped. I left the ward and watched through the open door from the reading room with my prick stiffening under my dressing-gown. It amuses me now how shocked I was by this development, how horrified that my will to resist my nature had failed me, as it was bound to as soon as I beheld Stanley naked. I was confused enough back then to believe in mind over matter, in the virtue of self-denial. It was only years later that I understood this to be a recipe for despair in all but the most exceptional of men.

  Matron Conlon disappeared briefly and came back with a dish of steaming water and a couple of towels. By then Stanley was shivering with the cold. Matron wiped him all over, talking herself through the more tender areas around his buttocks and back where there was a concentration of bruises and scrapes.

  ‘Sure you’re lucky those hooligans didn’t kill you,’ she said. ‘I told your mother what would happen to you in that school but of course she had the rest of them saying it’d be for the best.’

  Stanley must have been in considerable pain but he didn’t complain.

  ‘Well you’re the only bloke I know who’s tried to break back in here,’ said Riley, trying to cheer him up.

  ‘Fetch me the pyjamas there Arthur,’ Matron Conlon called out. She indicated the cabinet on the back wall of her office where the laundered pyjamas were stored.

  I went to fetch a pair and then sidled back into the bright light where Stanley was standing, one hand covering my stiffy and the other waving the pyjamas at him in a gesture I intended to be imperious. Stanley took them from me and turned away to dress. He hadn’t said a word up to that point but now he turned his miraculous head and spoke. He thanked Matron Conlon and asked if he could please go to the toilet and then could he possibly have something to eat because he’d only had stale bread and water since the morning. It was the first time I’d heard his voice. His English was perfect, with an American flatness to it straight out of the movies.