This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  Until Johno grabs me. Dragging me. Down along behind this bougainvillea maze. The thorns are ripping up our legs. Thorns that I can’t feel. We keep running until another half a mile or so on when we see a pile of militia uniforms, stacked liked dead sheep in the middle of a clearing. There’s maybe a few dozen of them, chucked around the base of a pole, with another man nailed to it above them, half eaten already by the harpies. Ernie has to stop to throw up.

  I would too, if it wasn’t for the sound of rifles being cocked above us. And someone shouting. Could be a dog barking for all we understand.

  Little yellow dogs. Two of them.

  Only two of them, coming down at us from an outcrop of granite boulders. I can take the one on the left from here, I know I can. I have my finger on the trigger: I will kill him. I am going to. If it’s the last thing I do I will kill this little mongrel.

  I fire and I don’t feel a thing. But all three of us have missed him. How could I have missed? Missed both of them, while the other one has got a shot in.

  He has shot Ernie through the chest. Ernie has fallen to his knees beside me, holding his chest; his eyes are screaming: Why? So am I. He’s an unarmed vulcanologist. He talks to rocks. Why did you kill him?

  Before I know what I’ve done, I’ve reloaded, and Sven has got a bullet into the one on the right, hit him in the shoulder. Not good enough, but before me or Johno have another go, there is a collective discharge of fire, from eight of them now that I can count. They keep firing at Sven. Into him. He is a very big man, but they keep firing into him. Don’t they know he’s probably already dead? Am I dead too? Have they shot me too? I wouldn’t know. I drop the rifle. Put my hands in the air.

  I must still be alive because I feel a shove behind me, something ripped from my swag. Barking at me, into me, and my shovel is thrown into my hands.

  ‘Digga! Digga!’ The little man is screaming up at me. His spit hitting my face. Black slit eyes. Teeth bared. Is this a man? He is so clean, neat and tidy. I stare at the little yellow star on his yellow cap.

  ‘Dig,’ I hear Johno say. ‘Dig, Brockie.’

  What? I look at Johno, begging me: Please.

  I don’t understand what’s going on. Dig what?

  I don’t get to find out.

  There is another discharge of fire.

  And that’s the end of us.

  BERNIE

  Up and down the rows of beans, Rock’s not coming home. Mrs Lockhart is sewing rabbit skins into her quota of a hundred vests for airmen, but Rock’s not coming home. The United States Supreme Commander of the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur, has finally arrived to have his photograph taken with Mr Curtin, for a hundred million tins of pork and beans, but Rock’s not coming home. It’s too late. Two months too late.

  The Japanese lined them up and tied their hands behind their backs with fishing cord and ordered them to march into the bush; some were shot, some were bayoneted.

  Only three have survived the New Britain massacres to tell the tale to the Canberra Times, and none of them is called Gordon Brock. One of them, who escaped from a place called Tol Plantation, said that all their identification papers and tags were taken and burned. That’s it, six-pennies’ worth of hope tells me, that’s what’s happened: he’s wandering around out there unidentified and unidentifiable. He has amnesia. He’s drifting out across the Coral Sea on a bamboo raft, notify the Coast Watch.

  But reality tells me it’s time to face facts. It doesn’t matter how wonderful and capable I think Gordon is; what chance would he have had? The Japs don’t trade in punches. They tie your hands behind your back and bayonet you. Just as the Americans aren’t here to rescue anyone but themselves – they’ve only come because they’ve lost the Philippines and need a place from which to try to win it back. If it wasn’t for that, Australia would be sacrificed, full stop, and Britain would be forced to pay a little more for inferior American beef and wool. Who would care? Only a handful of people who don’t matter, down round the forgettable side of the earth.

  It’s just as well I’m picking beans ten hours a day for the McDoughals. I’m too tired to be overcome by anything much but sleep at the end of every day. Be thankful for small mercies. Yes, yes, yes. At least it’s not a hundred degrees today; the breath of Satan is cooling with autumn. And I’m alone with my despair; the others, Mrs Denison and her Chrissie and Ruth, won’t get here until next week. Meanwhile, I’m the fastest bean-picker Mrs McDoughal’s ever seen. Searching for my courage in the leaves. If I can pick them fast enough, Hughie, will you reconsid–

  The horn of the ute toots over the other side of the field, near the homestead. Mrs Lockhart. And someone else, another lady. Oh? And two little boys, one of them jumping headlong off the back: Alby. It’s the Werners. Anna Werner running towards me, in her crimson D’Orsay t-straps, pretty fern print sundress, waving a letter, as if she’s won a trifecta at the races.

  ‘Bernadette!’ she’s breathless with it. ‘My brother – my brother, he is found!’

  That doesn’t immediately make sense to me, not until I remember that one of the reasons she’s remained in internment for so long has been her inability to prove who she is outside her husband’s false membership of the Nazi Party.

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Isn’t that good.’

  Mrs Lockhart gives me a sharp frown: You could be a bit more pleased for her, couldn’t you?

  ‘Yes.’ Anna is thrilled to pieces, hardly able to keep it in. ‘He escaped – he came through Denmark in a truck with furniture and then on a trawling boat across the North Sea. He is in London. He’s been there for months – but we only found out this morning. They gave me some letters from him and said now we can go!’

  Well good for you; my soul shrivels very quickly with the most hideous envy.

  Eric throws his arms around my waist, looking up at me with those irresistible blue eyes. ‘Will you visit us in Melbourne, Miss Cooper?’

  And not even that gets through. I say: ‘Course I will, sweetie.’ But I don’t mean it.

  Mrs McDoughal is magicking up a spread of scones and cordial on the verandah to celebrate, and Mrs Lockhart marches me inside for a word. ‘I know that you are upset, as I am too, but don’t you forget that woman has fourteen other relatives who haven’t escaped from Germany – including her eighty-seven-year-old grandmother. Straighten that back, girl – Anna thought you might take heart from her good news. So take heart.’

  So I do. Try to. Mrs McDoughal’s scones are almost as good as Mrs Lockhart’s, but they taste like sand today. Stuff one down and wave the Werners away. They’ll be staying at Riverbend tonight, before they get on the train tomorrow, back to their lives. Minus her husband Franz, of course, who’s still a fake Nazi, just as Mrs Zoc remains a dangerous fascist-anarchist, but at least Anna’s husband is safe in prison – he’s got a little orchestra going in there, one that’s dwindling daily as the Jewish boys keep getting released so they can go off and join the AIF.

  ‘Well, I’d better get back to it,’ I tell Mrs McDoughal. I’ll pick beans till sunset and then sleep out with the brown snakes.

  ‘Oh no you won’t, Bernadette,’ Mrs McDoughal shoos me off, expertly putting aside her worries, for her farm, her droving husband, and her son, youngest and only, somewhere in the Top End on Jap watch, to share another’s good news. ‘Have an early mark today. Go on. Go home and enjoy the rest of the day with the Werners.’

  Throw myself over Odd Socks thinking this’ll give me half an hour’s avoidance, but she decides today is the day she’ll go for a little trot. She can’t wait to get home. When we do I decide she’ll be needing a long brush out in the stable this afternoon; as if I am anywhere near competent at grooming her. Doesn’t matter, does it, Odds, thought that counts; main one: please don’t let Mrs Lockhart send the boys out into the yard. I want to be alone, with my miserable trifecta of loss. At least until tea.

  But I can’t even manage that. Halfway across the yard I see that Pete’s in the stable shed
. I’m not going in there now for anything. Big white stallion still frightens me silly. And this is why Odds was in such a hurry to get home, I see. She snorts excitedly: she’s got her boyfriend back for a visit. Can’t wait to say hello to him. Good grief. She practically pulls me into the shed.

  ‘G’day, um, Miss Coop–’ blue Scotch twill reaching out of the shadow of the overhanging roof, taking Odds’s reins from me.

  ‘Mitchell.’ I’m rude to him: ‘You can call me Bernadette – it’s easier.’

  ‘Right. Good.’ He manages to say half of it audibly: ‘Dette.’

  I say: ‘What are you doing home?’ Though I don’t care.

  ‘Easter. Come home early. See the stock agent tomorrow.’

  Tomorra. ‘Right.’ And then I remember I did know that: he’s got to sell off more of the flock; something about getting rid of the wethers, useless boy sheep, not worth their feed. That suddenly makes me so sad, and tired of being sad, I –

  ‘You want to go fishing or something this arvo?’

  ‘What?’ In the dimness of the shed, in my wanting, he even sounds like my Rock. I could say: You want to really upset me, then yes, let’s. But I’ve no doubt his mother’s put him up to this, so I say: ‘Don’t worry, Mitchell, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do.’

  He’s already got Odds’s saddle off for me and he says, tossing it over his shoulder: ‘I was going fishing anyway. Don’t come if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  He turns around from hanging the bridle. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’m sure that was convincing. My fingernails are shockingly filthy, aren’t they. If I stare at them for long enough, this wave of grief will pass. Or Mitchell will go away. He doesn’t.

  I can feel him walking towards me; his voice is a warm rasp of concern: ‘He’ll be right, I reckon, Gordon. You know, at school, with the five years between us, I was supposed to look out for him, Mum being an old friend of his dad, and both of us without brothers, but he didn’t need me. He’s pretty good at looking after himself. He’s got good bush sense, too.’

  Mitchell would know that’s a pretty useless offering, but he wants Gordon to be all right, and I do appreciate it, coming from one who’d no more waste a word than a drop of water. I look up at him, his lion jaw and sharp hazel eyes, not like my Rock much at all, not up close. They don’t even know they’re cousins. Second cousins. Doesn’t matter, does it. It’s care that counts. We’re all family, somehow.

  ‘So you want to come fishing, or not?’ He gives me his crooked smile. ‘Get away from Mum’s yacking and carry on for a spell.’

  ‘All right.’

  We walk up along the river’s edge, under the coolabahs and almost back to the McDoughals, to the old tumbledown wharf where, once upon a time before the railways, the wool steamers would pick up the Lockhart clip. We don’t talk; we throw the lines in and wait, disappear under our wide brims, ignoring the water creeping ever lower down the banks, exposing the roots of the big vanilla gums. I meditate instead upon the great mystery that is country boys’ preference for white moleskin trousers; ride a horse thirty miles in from Hell and not a speck of dust on them. I lose time altogether until, just as the sun starts setting, I get a tug on my line and I pull up a big silver perch.

  GORDON

  ‘What is your name?’

  I know my name. Brockie, it’s me – it’s Gerry. Errol Flynn, shaking me awake: You’ve got to get up, mate. I’ve got us a dinghy, down on the beach. It’s only two hundred yards. There was just enough daylight left for me to see that we would not include Johno. He wasn’t carrying a spun steel shearer’s bedourie oven in his swag, like me. His face. He was wide awake and dead cold. I’d landed on his arm. I didn’t want to leave him there. He still felt warm on that bit of his arm. But I got up and ran with Errol. I could hardly breathe, kneeling in the sand. Errol pulled me into the dinghy. Because I’ve got pneumonia. I know that as well. I was winded, too, from the bullets hitting the bedourie. Errol unrolled my swag on the dinghy and found two of them inside, gone right through the lid. Strike me blind, someone’s looking after you, aren’t they. They are. Not a scratch on me. Now. They healed.

  ‘Are you AIF or New Guinea Rifles?’

  Neither. I’m a geologist. With pneumonia. In Townsville, in the hospital, and I’d be dead if it wasn’t for my bedourie and Errol Flynn and sulfapryridine. I’m getting very well looked after here. I’m on the mend. The curtains are black but they’re open and the breeze is nice. I don’t want to talk, though. Didn’t Errol give them my name? He left me at Cairns. There was an air-raid siren going and he said: See you in San Francisco, Dozy. You’ll be right. I don’t know how I got to Townsville. I remember the smell of the sea in the bottom of that dinghy, though. Crook. A lot of sea and coconut milk and then I nearly slipped on the rope ladder boarding the ketch that picked us up. Some old salt with tattoos up his arms was shaking his head: You rowed from Wide Bay? Errol did. He rowed so far he missed the mainland of New Guinea and might have got us to Townsville himself, if the ketch hadn’t nearly run over us in full sail. It was getting away from the Solomons. I couldn’t row; couldn’t scratch myself. I’ve been crook for a long time. I don’t know how long. I don’t know what day it is. But I know who I am. I’d hand over my wallet and show you, if I knew where my wallet was.

  ‘You are quite safe. My name is Ackerman. David Ackerman, and I’m a doctor. You’re in the hospital, in Townsville, and you’re quite safe.’

  I look at the doctor now. It’s a different one today. He’s young, about my age, and his teeth are so straight and white he should be in the pictures. They’re amazing teeth.

  He says: ‘I’m an army doctor, a lieutenant, you can tell me. What’s your unit?’

  I shake my head, close my eyes.

  I’m not military, and I’m not safe. I’m running through the bougainvillea thorns again. The pink flowers and the gold palms on the blue sky. Red palms, yellow stars. When I can speak, when I can hold a line of consciousness, I know what I am going to do.

  ‘It’s not uncommon to lose speech from the shock of a difficult experience. It’s called nervous–’

  ‘No.’ That gets me talking. I know what he’s getting at. There’s nothing nervous about me. I missed that shot. I missed hitting that little mongrel. We were surprised and I was crook. I won’t miss again.

  ‘Ah, good. That’s the way. What’s your name then?’

  ‘Brock,’ I tell him: ‘Gordon Brock.’

  ‘Notwithstanding your general ill health, Mr – ah – Brock, you have a significant impairment in your right hand.’ This military doctor is middle-aged, short-sighted and overweight and he’s calling me unfit for service. It might be true that I’m not up to my normal state of health yet, but I’m not too far off. My lungs are clear and I have no impairment.

  I argue: ‘It’s not significant at all. You haven’t seen me shoot – there’s nothing impaired about my abilities there.’ I just wasn’t quick enough, practised enough. I will practise and I will get fit. I have every motivation for it. They killed Johno and Sven. They murdered Ernie. They killed all of Sid’s party, except for Errol, who only survived because, as he started to run, he stumbled off the top of that ridge and fell into the middle of some banana trees. I think about what they might have done to those nurses at Rabaul, in light of what they did to us. There’s dumb animal. And then there’s wilfully depraved. I think about what they’ve done to Darwin. That Lieutenant Ackerman told me he’s been learning a lot about burns lately, reckons at least a hundred were killed, some come from Broome too, and it’s all been kept out of the papers. He could understand my need to get into it. The mongrels are going to invade us, sometime probably quite soon. I tell this doctor: ‘My hand doesn’t give me any trouble.’

  So he puts down his clipboard and squeezes right behind the knuckle again to demonstrate otherwise: an electric shock up my forearm.

  I say: ‘It doesn’t give me any tr
ouble in the heat of firing.’ I didn’t feel a thing when I fired. I know I didn’t. It might have been the effect of adrenalin but it worked.

  He says, to my hand: ‘It is my responsibility to ensure that the Commonwealth of Australia does not spend a penny on time-wasters.’

  End of argument. I can’t believe I’m being rejected. I’ve never been rejected on my abilities at anything. You can’t reject me. With an audience of a dozen eighteen-year-old farmhands lined up behind me in this office at the town hall all thinking: Geez, I’m glad that’s not me. Bullshit.

  ‘It might be reparable, supposing it is what it feels to be, an old injury, poorly healed; I can refer you to a surgeon in Brisbane,’ this doctor says, still not bothering to look at me directly, ‘but it would be at your own expense and in your own time.’

  No. I don’t have time to waste – yours, the Commonwealth’s or mine. I’m not going to another hospital. I put my shirt back on and I could quilt myself for not having had this seen to when it happened. Why didn’t I stop at Dubbo for that X-ray? One, because I was embarrassed about fighting. And two, because I was in a hurry to get back to Coogee, to Bernie. How relevant are either of those things in my life today?

  The doctor is looking down at my form now, on the clipboard on the desk behind him. Beside it is a stamp pad and three stamps. You are not going to reject me. You are not going to bloody well reject me. I’m right on the verge of asking him for the referral to Brisbane when he looks up from the form.

  ‘Geologist, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say: ‘Why? Is that important?’

  ‘Important to the CSIR at the moment.’ He takes off his specs to look at me now as if he’s just recognised a fellow human. ‘They’re recruiting all manner of scientists – geologists, chemists, physicists and engineers, all the technicians they can find. Get yourself down to Canberra and you’ll have a job before you walk in the door.’

  The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Go and join the public service. In Canberra. Go and sleep in a lab. Not likely. Let’s not put too fine a point on it: I’ve got a score to settle.