This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  We keep on southwards about two miles, crossing the old track that goes up to the first of our rig sites, up to the old Slippery Dip. It’s already almost completely grown over. There’s no sky here to look up at. I think I understand Johno’s shitfight philosophy of chaos and equilibrium now, though. Whatever happens, this is Nature’s game. We’re all dumb animals, aren’t we. Everything creates as much as it destroys. No bad guys. What’s the difference between our blokes stealing four black marys and the Japs stealing our six white nurses? Two women. And a volcano that won’t erupt when you want it to. Rain that stops to make life easy for your enemy. How can you fight that? You can’t. Don’t need science to tell you. Johno’s wrong about Newton’s Second Law being there for us when no one else is. Science is irrelevant out here. But I don’t challenge him on it. I could turn to prayer any minute. I don’t want to die. I think about that little wagtail I saw at Blackie’s Camp challenging the kookaburra. Winning. Fearless. But we’re not birds, are we. We’re a bit dumber than them.

  We make our camp, just before dusk, in one of the hundreds of caves at the base of the ranges, and as the others start hunting around for kindling I start cutting up my spare singlet. I wrap this strip of blue singlet around the top of my hand. I don’t know if it will do anything to help absorb the impact of discharge. I don’t want to kill anyone. But I will if I have to. I just don’t want to die.

  Sven gets the fire going, and then we all stand there looking at it. No one’s keen to chat. No one game. Johno is still steaming. I look at Sven: shirtless giant, his natural state, and his face and beard are grey with boot polish. At least we look frightening. Not one of us managed to pack a razor.

  A scream tears up through the back of the cave and something darts out through the smoke. It’s only a cuscus possum running for its life, but I’m already tripping backwards, over a log. I land on my arse. Sven and Ernie could die laughing.

  But Johno doesn’t think it’s funny. ‘Fuck this,’ he says. And walks off.

  I follow him, down to the rocky bank of a creek. He stands there with his hands on his head, telling the water: ‘Fuck.’

  I say: ‘Stop saying fuck – you’re upsetting me.’

  Not even that makes him look at me. So I stand right beside him. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing worth discussing now.’ His arms come down by his sides and he pushes out a breath, like he’s run out of steam.

  ‘Why not?’ I ask him. ‘What’s changed from yesterday, this morning or tomorrow? Really – we’re still stuffed.’

  ‘This morning, I still had a life, something of it.’ He closes his eyes.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Back at Kabakada,’ he says, and it’s a while before he lets this go. ‘Lil, her name is. Was. Lilla.’

  A girl. Whoa. That’ll do it to you. I’ve never thought of Johno with a girl. A native girl. To-Lai girl. Somehow, that’s not surprising. It explains why he never liked to stop in town for too long, always wanting to go bush. But it is … not good for him, today. Not good not knowing if she might be one of the girls taken from the village. Not good at all. I say: ‘Things could still turn around and …’

  That makes him look at me. ‘Bullfuckingshit. Whatever happens, it’s finished with her now.’

  It probably is and he’s flattened over it. I look at his emu face. No time like the present to ask him what I’m wondering: ‘Are you To-Lai too?’

  ‘No.’ He looks down at the rocks. ‘Not To-Lai.’ It’s a while before he lets this go too. ‘My grandmother was a Thursday Islander. Her father was a Dutch pearler, and she looked white, more or less. We were brought up to say she was a Portuguese from Timor. Anything but a black. Melanesian is too close to Abo in Queensland. She taught me to sail, my gran, she taught me to read too, and I could never tell anyone, Guess where we went for the summer holidays – spearfishing in the Torres Strait. It’s all bullshit.’

  ‘Yeah.’ And not just in Queensland: you don’t want to be black anything in my country either, roped off on the missions. I look down at the ground too, remembering one particular moment of bullshit up at Brewarrina with Dad. We saw a fight outside the Royal, a black stockman being quilted into the dust. Dad was shaking his head, You can’t refuse a hardworking man a beer, but we kept walking, looking away. I tell Johno, as if it could make a difference: ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I,’ he says, angry again. ‘Sorry for myself. Even here, on New Britain, where a black man’s got a bit of pride, I still would never tell anyone, not until I met Lilla. Ashamed of my own grandmother, scared I’d have my qualifications taken off me if anyone ever found out. That’s how I was raised: don’t tell or Dad will lose his job.’ His dad is a steamer captain, on the Townsville to Brisbane run. I’ve never seen a black man on a steamer. I’ve never seen a black man on a tram. Johno looks at me again now, but with some agony I do recognise: ‘Then here, I’m too scared to ask Lilla’s father for her because I’m not black enough. I’d have been married by now if I wasn’t so gutless. I could have–’

  ‘You’re not gutless,’ I say, and stop short of telling him he can’t compete with me there. I didn’t put up a fight for Bernie, did I. Didn’t get on a plane and go home for her when I could have. Too scared to. I tell him: ‘We’re all idiots.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says. ‘I love you too.’ And he’s finished this spit. He lets his shoulder hit mine as he turns and we start walking back. ‘Doesn’t make it any easier to take, though, does it.’

  ‘No.’

  And we’re still stuffed.

  BERNIE

  February. This month is the cruellest, in temperature and circumstance. The air is crispy with heat and it’s only just after dawn. Sunday morning and I haven’t slept except for a horrible dream, running through some maze of foreign streets with a bolt of sapphire shantung unravelling behind me, in flames. Because Singapore has fallen. The jewel in the crown of the Empire is gone. Truly. Darwin has been bombed too, and with it Sydney seaside property values: you couldn’t sell Arcadia now for five bob with the wireless thrown in. And still the Americans haven’t come. Because their hands are full in the Philippines, and of course there was that business of them losing half their ships and planes in Hawaii while I was underwater, wasn’t there.

  I don’t want to get up. But I have to. These Japs won’t get to me. Can’t. I will stretch my hope three times from here to Jupiter and it won’t break no matter what they do. At least it is Sunday and Mrs Lockhart is religious enough that the wireless is not switched on, so I can’t hear that anything worse has happened. But still, Sundays I can hear the silence stretching, from all the personal ads I’ve put in the papers, from the Sydney Herald, to the Northern Standard in Darwin, the Courier Mail in Brisbane, Townsville Daily, Cairns Post, and the Rural Press across the northwest from Armidale to Broken Hill: Bernadette Cooper searching for Gordon Brock call urgently Hay X 43. A continent of silence.

  Apart from the bombs dropping on Darwin, about which the Department of Information is saying: What’s a few bombs to us? No one died. Just as no one’s died in New Britain either. Department of Lies.

  Get up: I’m not giving in to this.

  Neither is Mr Curtin. He’s made the US Army an offer of heavily discounted pork if they help us. How could they refuse?

  Stop it, Missy.

  Losing hope is an indulgence I’ve got no time for. Or at least I’ve got better things to do. There is always plenty to do, even on a Sunday in a little country town. Go to church with Mrs Lockhart and be reminded by the calm and gentle certainty of the Reverend Shepherd – truly – that I have two hands and a heart to help, and no giving is too small a gift. That way salvation lies, and the other way of eternal pain is reserved for the manufacturers of munitions, and the bank managers and pressmen who facilitate their devilry. Yea verily, those suffering with this drought suffer just the same as those who suffer bombs, only a lot more quietly and never in the news at all. Rejoice that you are not a sheep. Or a bea
n. Be happy for an hour or so listening to Mum and Dad bickering over my state of Presbyterianism.

  Then, after lunch, while Mrs Lockhart dutifully breaks the Sabbath running up ever more blackout curtains ahead of the Jap invasion of these pitiless burnt-toast plains, I’ll plod over to the camp on Odds, and I’ll spend the afternoon with the Werner boys, doing something listless. Even Alby is spent in this heat, can’t be bothered looking at his little brother – does one need more evidence that Hughie can be merciful? I’ll read them a story, Paterson poems in an accent so broad my jaw won’t move at all, or I might just lie on the floor of the dining room breathing in the charcoal air and listening to Mrs Zoc tell me that she is one hundred and fifteen percent certain, bella, that Gordon is all right. He has to be. She says: I would know, Bernadetta, believe me, he is like a son to me, he is my good boy, I would know.

  Know that she is a madwoman and that I am too, as I go to the dressing table now, automatic reflex picking up my hair comb, the one he gave me, pressing the little spray of amethyst daisies to my lips, Thinking of you . . . And no one in this town will say it’s too sparkly a thing to wear to church, because everyone the length of the Paddock from Deniliquin to Wilcannia knows why I wear it: because they’re all mad enough themselves to know that if I wear it religiously I can make him safe. I fix it into my hair now before I’ve even got dressed, a little spray of mauve sea, and my Good Companion looks at me, from where it sits on the floor beside the wardrobe, in its case, untouched since …

  Something nags at me, that I should write against this. But I don’t know what I mean by that. I don’t know what I might write. Not Eugenia’s flight of fancy. That’s gone too. Something else. Maybe something true.

  Open up my marquetry box of precious things, my portable Arcadia, and I take out the newspaper photograph of us that sits on top of Mum and Dad’s bits and pieces, and I look into his lovely face, his lovely eyes, full of promise, ready for anything, and I’m sure he must be all right, too. Out there … somewhere … I lift the clipping out of the box, to read our nice Aussie story that I know off by heart – Gordon Brock of Nyngan with his fiancée Bernadette Cooper at Sydney Flying Boat Terminal, Rose Bay. Mr Brock is on his way to New Guinea – and Mum’s wedding band falls out from one of the folds behind it. Plain, gold. Rose gold so coppery it became the shape of her finger over time; they couldn’t afford better, couldn’t afford an engagement ring either, but this one alone is perfect, a perfect wobbly circle, perfect because Dad bought it with every hope and promise in him.

  Courage. Put it in my pocket with my jasper B, and for another day it’s mine.

  GORDON

  ‘Oh yeah!’ Johno shouts from the top of the palm. ‘It’s them!’ Scrambling down again so fast he’s already packed up and taken off after them. ‘White stars at the tails – it’s them all right.’

  Americans.

  Sven is ready to take off too. ‘How many?’

  ‘Three of them, come up from the south. They’re here for us.’

  Three American planes. By the look of Johno and Sven, it might well be three hundred. I suppose that’s what a month of nothing much but desperation will do to you. I wouldn’t know. I can’t share their enthusiasm at the moment. I have the flu. Two years living in the tropics and now I get crook. Probably from a month of living on feral pigs and bitter limes, inside a cloud, on the spine of the Baining Ranges.

  I have to say: ‘Hang on a second. What exactly is our plan?’

  ‘To get going,’ Johno says, with the look on his face saying, And don’t you bloody well hold us up. ‘We have to get down to Wide Bay. Be ready for them – that’s where the force’ll make land. And that’s where our mob will be.’

  I don’t know if it’s just being crook that’s making me concerned for the soundness of this idea. It’s been a long time since we last saw Sid and we’ve been through this excitement now three times, sighting more RAAF Wirraways, five planes in total, one meeting a fiery end in the side of a mountain, never to be seen again. I don’t trust that anyone’s coming, or what we might find at Wide Bay if or when we get there. But I don’t know who’s more cracked: him or me.

  ‘Why don’t we wait till some more come over?’ Ernie says, somehow having become the least cracked among us.

  ‘No, not this time.’ Johno’s that sure. Or is he just wanting to be? ‘This time they’re coming.’

  I’m just as unsure. ‘But what if–’ I can’t finish the thought because I’m coughing my guts up.

  ‘What if what, Doze? What if we get to Wide Bay and there’s Japs there, or no one there at all? I’m pinching a fucking canoe and getting out of here, that’s what’s going to happen. I will get us to the mainland. You can stay here with your flu and die that way if you want, but I’d rather you stuck with me.’

  ‘Righto. You don’t have to yell.’ There’s a six-inch drill grinding through my skull as it is.

  I start rolling up my swag around my bedourie, trying to recreate a map of the Gazelle in my mind. If we keep due south from here, what would it be, fifteen, maybe twenty miles down to the coastal flats? But if we can’t keep to that course, then we should probably stay west. Southwest. Then the worst that can happen is that we’ll come out of the ranges into central New Britain and have to head east, to avoid the very proud tribesmen that live there. They don’t speak Kua-Nua and they eat people they don’t like. And that is another good reason to try to get out of the ranges generally, as well as the reason we’ve had to keep moving through the mountains all this time anyway. The Baining tribesmen up here don’t speak Kua-Nua either and only just enough pidgin to tell Johno to keep away from their villages. I’ve got the shivers. My hands are shaking as I fix the buckles of the swag over my hand shovel, and not just from fear. I’m so flaming cold. I don’t want to walk anywhere. We haven’t dried out at all since we crossed a creek almost a week ago, and my feet are now made of an alien pulp that should be sent off for biological analysis.

  Ernie picks up my swag with his, and Sven says: ‘I’ll help you if you get tired.’ Carry me? He could too, but the idea makes me cranky. I take my swag off Ernie: ‘I’m not that crook.’

  Yet.

  By the next morning I’m tempted to let the jungle harpies have me. I’m too crook. We must be nearly there. The walking has been relatively easy. We’re down to about two thousand feet elevation, I reckon, and there’ll be bananas somewhere for me today, if I could raise my head off the ground. Beyond the next ridge I’m sure we’ll see the coast, but I’m not going to make it. I don’t want Sven to carry me. It’s not reasonable. I’ve lost some weight, but I’d still be near twelve stone. I’m a liability.

  ‘Get some more hot water into you.’ Johno’s making a billy when he says: ‘What’s that sound?’

  Even I listen. Sounds like heavy fire, at a distance. Machine-guns. Maybe anti-aircraft fire. Coming from over the other side of the ridge. But we can’t hear any planes. Can’t see from here either.

  ‘Shit, that must be them,’ Johno says.

  Forget the billy, I have no trouble getting to my feet now. It has to be them. Or someone. Come for us. What else could it be?

  We get going, quickly, to get round the ridge, and the firing continues through the morning as we do. Intermittent. Not like a drill. It’s random. It must be a battle.

  But still, we can’t see anything when we come out onto the lowland, at the back of a copra plantation. The guns seem to have stopped now too.

  Sven points through the rows of palms, down a drive, at what looks like the roof of a big bungalow. ‘I think I know where this is – on the north side of the bay. There is a beach on the other side of the plantation.’

  Johno looks down along the bougainvillea hedge that runs behind it like a loose border. ‘We’ll keep to the cover here, though. Follow it round.’

  We follow it round for about half a mile.

  Till Sven puts out his hand and stops.

  The four of us stop dead as one animal. />
  They can’t see us, but we can see them. Through the pink flowers of the bougainvillea canes.

  Japs. This is the first of them I’ve seen. They are small. I’m shocked at the size of them. Little men in yellow-brown uniforms. About twenty of them.

  They look to have caught and bailed up a party of half-a-dozen AIF, taken their guns. One of them is that Lieutenant Campbell, with his hands up, but I can’t see the faces of the others. One of them is kneeling. A rifle is being shoved into the middle of his back, and he’s getting screamed at in I don’t know what language. His hands are tied behind him. He’s still holding a piece of white material in his left hand.

  He is shot in the back of the head. His blood shoots out across a stack of cut palm stems near him. Red blood on the gold stems.

  Another of the Japs steps over him, straddling him, and drives a bayonet through his back.

  I don’t understand what’s happening. Why would you do that? He had surrendered. Why did you kill him? There are more of you than us. I don’t understand. I can’t move.