Amongst the Dead

by Robert Gott

  I was pondering the casting of Pygmalion when we drove through the gates of the showgrounds, which was where the Third Division had set up camp. We were deposited inside the front gate, and I thought I detected a slight sneer on the face of the corporal who checked our papers when he discovered that we were members of the concert party. We were given a tent number and vague directions as to its whereabouts. Finding it was easier said than done. The showgrounds had been converted into a small city of tents, but an inquiry to a passing private led us to a section dominated by a fair-sized stage, with its sides and roof made of large tarpaulins. There was a great deal of activity around the stage, which seemed to be quite well set up, with an effectively painted backdrop and a row of lights — powered, I supposed, by a generator kept at sufficient distance to minimise the noise.

  My excitement grew, despite the banality of the part I was expected to play. There were actors on stage, one of whom was practising an impressive pratfall. I was glad that I wasn’t obliged to engage in knockabout comedy. I didn’t think it was funny, and it hurt. There were musicians as well, including one who was off by himself coaxing a racket out of an accordion — an instrument whose portability is its only redeeming feature. The overall impression was one of busy rehearsal, and it seemed to involve a large number of people.

  The sight of the stage caused Brian’s face to lose its colour. The reality of being expected to perform in front of a large crowd must have just hit him.

  ‘Quite a set-up,’ I said to Glen.

  ‘According to the schedule, there’s one performance tomorrow night and then the whole thing comes down, and we head for Mt Isa.’

  ‘I’ll need to find the people in my sketches,’ I said. ‘I don’t think slipping into their routines will be too difficult. It’s not like I’m a last-minute replacement for King Lear, is it?’

  Glen narrowed his eyes.

  ‘This is a professional outfit, Will. Don’t underestimate how sharp you’re going to have to be. You’ll be up there with people who do this for a living — people who’ve performed in London — and they’ll expect you to be up to speed and up to scratch.’

  I took his little homily with good grace.

  We found our tent, stepped onto the wooden flooring at its entrance, and went in. There were four cots inside, and on one of them sat a thin young man who was sewing a sequin onto a garment that fell across his knees with the unmilitary and sinuous drape of a vamp’s gown. He looked up when we entered and said ‘Gedday’ in an accent more suggestive of slip-rails than slips. ‘Sergeant Rothfield’ll be pleased to see you blokes. I’m Lon — as in Chaney.’

  He didn’t get up, but his demeanour was perfectly pleasant and I immediately warmed to him. We’d barely made our introductions when we were joined by Sergeant Rothfield himself, who must have been alerted to our arrival. There was no room in the tent for five men to stand, so we sat awkwardly, with the sergeant choosing to sit beside me. He was, it transpired, the producer of Camp Happy. Without much ado, and giving the strong impression that he was pressed for time, Sergeant Rothfield handed us the latest running sheets for the production.

  ‘It’s two-and-a-half hours,’ he said. ‘Non-stop. Twenty-five separate items, no breaks. One comes on as the other goes off. You can see where your cues are, and you’ll get a bit of a run-through this evening and tomorrow. I presume you know your lines, Will; but as the sketches are old Tivoli standbys, you probably knew them before you came on board anyway.’

  I refrained from correcting him on this point, even though I was stung by his assumption that I was the kind of performer who’d be well acquainted with tired Tivoli standby acts.

  ‘Tomorrow’s performance starts at six, and it goes on no matter what — rain, hail, earthquake, volcanic eruption. I’ll leave you to it. Lon here will look after you.’

  ‘He’s a good bloke,’ Lon said. ‘Writes plays, apparently. I’ve never read any of them but.’

  The running sheet confirmed that Camp Happy lurched from low comedy to tear-jerking renditions of ‘Danny Boy’ and the inevitable ‘Ave Maria’. There was a baritone, a tenor, a swing band, a ventriloquist, sight acts, Glen’s magic spot, a ukulele player (ugh), a classical pianist, and several utility actors. Lon was to appear in the first half as a hillbilly, a type whose comic appeal escaped me, and in the second as a burlesque femme called Lola. ‘Something,’ he said, ‘in the Carmen Miranda line. I get plenty of whistles.’

  ‘Brian here will give you a run for your money,’ Glen said. ‘He’s my beautiful assistant.’

  Lon laughed.

  ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘you’ll be beating them off with a stick.’

  That night’s rehearsal was so energising that I stopped minding the inanity of my lines. I was just happy to be on a stage and in the company of real actors. The men I was playing against were far from amateurs. They were assured and slick, and appreciative of the fact that I was obviously a dependable and skilled replacement for whoever it was who’d fallen ill. It all happened so quickly and in such a blaze of lights and noise that I didn’t take in anyone’s name, but stood on the sidelines when I wasn’t required and watched in a kind of mesmerised ecstasy, moved foolishly to tears by a maudlin tune — not because it touched me, but because I felt, suddenly, for the first time in a very long time, that I was home.

  It has always been my experience that joy is an emotion that is peculiarly susceptible to rot. It therefore wasn’t very surprising that my pleasure at being back on stage was short lived. The morning’s rehearsal didn’t go well, with my acting partners being openly hostile to the small improvements I’d made overnight in my part. My defence of the changes was met with an uncompromising, ‘Just play the fucking part as it’s written.’ Not wishing to behave with the prima donna selfishness my partners were exhibiting, I acquiesced; but actors are fragile, volatile creatures, and my gall at wishing to give myself just a couple of memorable lines damaged my standing in the company. Where Brian was welcomed and chatted to, I was sent to Coventry and treated with cool, dismissive indifference. There were no complaints about my performance; but after each run-through I found myself in the wings alone.

  I didn’t mind. Camp Happy was just a conduit through which Brian and I were obliged to pass before undertaking the real purpose of our trip. Indeed, any deep attachment to the concert party would have been inadvisable, given that we’d be leaving it in a matter of days.

  After lunch, Brian suggested that we hitch a lift into town and visit the George Hotel where my old troupe would, no doubt, still be staying.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I don’t want to see any of them.’

  ‘Not even Arthur?’

  ‘Especially not Arthur.’

  As is often the case with my brother, he mistook my tone and assumed that I was defiantly clinging to the notion that I bore no responsibility for my poor relations with Arthur. Before I could ask him to pass on my sincere and profound regrets, he’d left, and I could only hope that he wouldn’t take the liberty of speaking on my behalf. I would have followed him, but I decided then and there that all that had happened prior to this day, Friday, 16 October 1942, was to lie undisturbed. Encroachments from both the recent and more distant past were unwelcome and I’d resist them, and beat them back, whether they came as single spies or whole battalions. I’d defend the bridge from the past to the present with the determination and courage of Horatio.

  I spent the afternoon running through my unchanged lines, and as the time approached for costume and make-up I began to feel the adrenalin-flutter of nervous expectation. The dressing-room was the back of a three-ton truck, parked out of sight of the audience, behind the stage. It wasn’t ideal, and most changes took place on the ground outside, with costumes being handed down from racks. My make-up was basic — something to accentuate the eyes, the eyebrows, and the mouth — and in my top hat and tails I couldn�
�t wait to step out into the warm embrace of the audience. When I looked at myself in the mirror, and adjusted my bowtie, I knew that acting wasn’t just a profession; it was a vocation. The moment was spoiled somewhat when the mirror was shared with a fellow actor who said, unnecessarily, ‘Remember, Will, just speak the fucking lines as written. Your lips are too red, by the way. You look like a fucking nancy boy catamite.’

  I spoke my lines as written, and the audience couldn’t have known how aggrieved I was at being reduced to a cipher. I fed the other actors their lines, to which they responded and got the laughs, despite the antiquity of the jokes. The soldiers in the audience were so generous as to be almost undiscerning. Perhaps a sense of imminent death helps breathe life into old gags.

  I came off stage confident that I’d done my job well, although no one patted me on the back. Things were hectic, of course. I’m almost certain there was no deliberate slight.

  It was Brian who stopped the show. The moment he walked on stage next to Glen — who looked like a poor man’s Mandrake — was the first time I’d seen him in full costume. His hand rested on Glen’s arm as he crossed to the centre of the stage, and he moved with the fluid grace of a woman who, if she knew anything at all, knew that she was sufficiently beautiful to snag the glances of watching men. Glen manipulated ropes, cards, coins and silks, and brought a member of the audience to the stage where, with Brian’s help, he divested the hapless private of his watch, his wallet, a filthy handkerchief and a gold chain. The audience howled when Brian wove himself around the victim and, in one quick, deft movement, seemed to reach into the soldier’s trousers and withdraw a fully extended, army-issue condom, creating the bizarre impression that the soldier had come to the concert wearing it. His protestations only made the crowd laugh louder. Brian didn’t speak a single line, which preserved the spectacular illusion of femininity he’d created. Unlike Lon, who appeared later as Lola, Brian hadn’t chosen to play his role as burlesque, but had attempted the infinitely more difficult task of causing an observer to ask, ‘Is he, or isn’t he?’

  Afterwards in our tent I was unstinting in my praise, and I think Brian was pleased to hear it.

  ‘I saw everyone today,’ he said. ‘At the hotel.’

  He waited for a moment, hoping to elicit a response from me. Having already bolstered his ego, I decided against giving him this small satisfaction. When it became clear that I had no intention of asking after their welfare, he volunteered, ‘They’re all fine. I thought they might want to know how you were going, but nobody asked.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, ‘and you thought it was important to tell me that.’

  He must have realised suddenly that he’d been guilty of an undeserving meanness — and whatever flaws might be found in his vast catalogue of them, meanness wasn’t one of them — because he tried to save the situation by saying, ‘I just meant that they didn’t say anything nasty, so that’s a good sign.’

  ‘No, Brian. There’s nothing nastier than silence.’

  I slept well, despite being vaguely troubled by my acting troupe’s snub.

  The next morning, the Third Division Concert Party was loaded into three trucks and a parlour coach. The stage had been dismantled during the night, mostly by a working party whose brawn we wouldn’t have access to in Mt Isa. We’d all be expected to help put together this cumbersome structure and then to pull it down, almost immediately.

  I’ve never been particularly good at small talk, so the two-day journey to Mt Isa, crammed into a bus with perhaps twenty others, some of whom had taken a set against me, promised to be something of an ordeal. The promise was soon realised; but well before we’d arrived in Mt Isa, conditions on the bus had become truly awful and the lack of goodwill had become general.

  All conversation in the bus died when we entered Mt Isa. I say ‘entered,’ but it isn’t the kind of place you enter. More correctly, we passed through a cloud of roiling dust into a world that struck me as so ‘other’ as to generate an uncertain, but definite, fear in all of us. The presence of the American military was immediately apparent. Trucks ground their gears and blew their horns with abandon. The most astonishing thing of all was the unexpected realisation that the US army was populated by black men. We’d seen only a few of these fellows in Melbourne, but here in Mt Isa they seemed to outnumber white soldiers ten to one. It was explained to me later that the Australian government had reluctantly suspended the White Australia Policy on the understanding that black Americans would be relegated mostly to the back blocks; and if the streets of Mt Isa were any guide, the American administration was keeping its end of the bargain.

  I don’t think I will ever again experience the strange contrast of noise and crowds to the utter desolation of the surrounding landscape.

  The dust that blew into the bus like smoke was so thick that I couldn’t understand how, whenever we breathed it in, it didn’t simply turn to mud in our lungs and drown us. The bus crawled through the vehicle-clogged streets towards the racecourse where we were to spend the night, and where we were to raise our theatre for one performance of Camp Happy to an audience of, obviously, mostly Americans. Conditions at the racecourse were appalling, but the necessity of putting up the theatre denied us time to assimilate this fact until the prospect of sleeping in the open, in the dust, could no longer be ignored. It wasn’t the sleeping arrangements that stunned me initially. It was the flies. No plague in Egypt could compete with them.

  Having been raised with fastidiousness about germs, I considered each individual fly to be an explosive threat to good health. To be covered in them from head to foot as they sought out moisture around my nose, lips, eyes, and ears, on any exposed skin, and anywhere on my clothes where there was the promise of sweat — and I was sweating profusely, the heat being intense — was horrifying to me. It was a sudden leap to go from hunting down a single fly in a room to be swarming with them like a piece of carrion. I was afraid to open my mouth lest dozens of them crawl inside, and I knew that many of them would have come from the pit toilets that must have been dug to accommodate this influx of soldiers.

  Nevertheless, it is amazing how quickly one becomes inured to something as disgusting as insistent flies. It was impossible to keep them at bay, so eventually they crawled with impunity, depositing microbial horrors where they willed.

  The theatre was more or less raised by nightfall; so, after a stomach-bogglingly awful meal, it was decided that, as this was to be our only free night in Mt Isa, we’d wander into what passed for the centre of town. This turned out to be more complicated than anticipated, though. Mt Isa wasn’t a sleepy little town. Its position as a railhead meant that thousands upon thousands of tons of equipment were routinely unloaded here for transport north by road into the Territory. With tons of war materials came thousands of personnel, and the Americans didn’t travel light. Mt Isa had become a de facto military base, but a posting here was no picnic. The black soldiers were acutely aware that many of their white colleagues were idling comfortably in towns on the east coast, an option that was largely closed to them because of their inconvenient colour. Consequently, the mood in Mt Isa was unpredictable, and we were told that it was inadvisable to venture off the racecourse without carrying a sidearm at the very least.

  Whether or not it was true that we could expect every G.I. we met to be armed with a knife or a razor, it was bound to have a discouraging effect on easy social intercourse to imagine that a wrong word might lead to an open jugular. Brian blithely volunteered that I was handy with a gun, and someone produced a Luger — borrowed with permission, I was assured, from a captain who was confined to his patch of bare earth by a ferocious bout of diarrhoea. I strapped it on reluctantly, but I could sense that it improved my standing amongst my fellow actors immediately. I thought perhaps I might contrive to be armed during any further discussions about scripts.

  Everything about Mt Isa was gruelling. Walking to t
he main street was gruelling; finding a place to buy a beer was gruelling; buying the beer was gruelling; even drinking it was gruelling. There was too much of everything — too many flies, too many people, too much heat, too much dust, too much noise, too much aggression, and too much boredom. No wonder that the main streets were jammed with M.Ps. in jeeps, usually travelling in groups of four, and almost all of them black.

  I didn’t start the fight, but in retrospect I probably shouldn’t have fired the Luger. It was really Glen’s fault. Somehow our small group ended up outside the American PX, which had been set up in a large tent on a vacant piece of baked earth in the main street. (There can’t be too many towns that boast vacant, blasted blocks in their main street). The crush here was awful, and Glen saw an opportunity to fleece some doughboys of their dollars. He did spectacularly well, aided by the inebriated state of his victims, but the entertainment to be derived from watching cards vanish and your sure bets fail is short-lived when money changes hands. The G.I.s weren’t as gracious about losing as the diggers on the train had been, and they were losing more, and to an undeclared enemy.

  Before I really understood what was happening, American soldiers began to coalesce on one side of Glen, and Australians on the other. It could only end badly. Glen was sitting down behind an upturned crate on which he was laying out his cards and conning his audience into laying their bets. Perhaps from his position he couldn’t see that sides had formed because, instead of packing up his deck and retreating, he asked smugly, ‘Anyone else?’