Amongst the Dead

by Robert Gott

  A soldier pushed his way to the front of the group and stood before Glen. He was tall and lean, and so dark that it took a moment to register that he wore a neat moustache. Everything about him was neat. He seemed to repel the dust and grime that clung to the rest of us. I was lost in admiration.

  ‘I would like to place a bet with you, sir,’ he said, in a voice that bore no relation to the black-American caricatures familiar to me from the movies.

  ‘I’ll be happy to take your money,’ Glen said, and all the invisible ties that bound us were pulled a little tighter. You could see it as people tensed, or became suddenly more attentive. Glen was oblivious, concentrating no doubt on setting up his trick.

  ‘Here’s the deal,’ he said. ‘You choose a card from this deck, and show your buddies, but don’t show me. Put it back in the deck, I’ll shuffle, and you think of a number between one and fifty-two. Can you manage that?’

  The ties tautened.

  ‘Tell us the number you thought of, I’ll hand you the deck, and you start turning the cards over one by one until you get to that number. That’ll be your card. You turn them. I won’t touch them. Do you reckon you can do that?’

  Before the soldier had a chance to reply, Glen produced fifty American dollars, dollars he’d won earlier, and slammed them on the crate.

  ‘Tell you what. That’s fifty bucks, fifty-until-recently-Yankee bucks. If this doesn’t work, the fifty is yours. All you have to do is put up ten. You could win fifty, but you can only lose ten. That too complicated for you?’

  With frightening civility, the soldier said, ‘I’ll risk five dollars. That’s all.’

  ‘No worries, mate. I’m glad to see that you understand it is a risk.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said ominously, ‘it is a risk.’

  Glen was a good magician, but his instinct for danger was poor. He held the deck towards the soldier, who took a card from it and made a show of displaying it to a few men nearby. He returned the card to the deck, and Glen began to cut and shuffle.

  ‘OK,’ he said, still shuffling. ‘Think of a number and tell us.’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’

  Glen furrowed his brow in a bad approximation of concern, as if this was the one number he’d hoped not to be chosen, and continued shuffling. He handed the deck to the soldier and said, ‘Start turning them over, Private. When you get to the twenty-eighth card, that’ll be the one you picked.’

  Slowly the count began. What should have been a simple entertainment was mutating before our eyes into a bitter contest. When the twenty-sixth card was turned, the air was electric, and I prayed that Glen had been sufficiently canny to get the trick wrong and lose the fifty dollars.

  The soldier turned over the twenty-seventh card, and Glen said, ‘Before you flip it, tell us all what card you picked.’

  ‘The two of hearts,’ he said, and his carefully modulated voice did nothing to calm my nerves. On the contrary, his self-discipline was terrifying, and he turned the card with agonising deliberation.

  It was the two of hearts.

  There was a moment when all those assembled might have laughed and applauded. It ended when Glen folded his arms in the smug certainty that he’d made a fool of not just this soldier, but all of them. My mouth became dry and I began to breathe with shallow, rapid inhalations.

  It was the flash of what I took to be a knife, or a vicious razor, that caused me to draw the Luger from its holster. The effect was as if I’d taken a cattle prod and poked each and every G.I. in the groin with it. They recoiled, and a cry went up from somewhere amongst them that the ‘Ossies’ (with the ‘s’ over-emphasised in that frightful American way) were about to fire on them. The inevitability of a riot breaking out struck me so forcibly that raising the gun and firing two quick shots in the air to quell it seemed to me to be entirely reasonable. However, the crack of the Luger had the perverse effect of galvanising Glen’s audience into violent unanimity, and they surged towards us with fists flailing.

  I was one of the first of our group to be knocked to the ground and trampled mercilessly beneath heavy, U.S. army-issue boots. I curled into a ball, protecting my face and head, and so didn’t see the rapid arrival of numerous M.P.s, who brought the situation under control with ruthless efficiency. I heard gunshots, but was distracted from any proper assessment of the state of play by several sharp and painful kicks to my back, buttocks, ribs, and legs. I knew from experience that bruising would be extensive. I hoped that Brian had protected himself against a similar battering. A heavily bruised femme would create the unfortunate impression of an unhappy domestic situation.

  I don’t think I fell unconscious at any time, but at some point I was lying amid a forest of trousered legs, and at another I was sprawled in the dirt with no one around me, and with flies reclaiming their temporarily abandoned demesne. There was a great deal of shouting, with the M.P.s bringing their soldiers under control largely through screaming abuse at them. The other Australians had sensibly melted away as soon as it was safe to do so. They were actors, after all, and were unaccustomed to fisticuffs, unless they were carefully choreographed. The Americans would have pummelled them into the dust. I understood this but, nevertheless, it would have been nice if someone, Brian or Glen perhaps, had remained long enough to help me to my feet.

  As it was, I stood groggily, and endured derisive laughter and a couple of pointless shoves from a sweating private. I think he said ‘Faggot’, but I can’t be certain because his accent was absurd. I smiled at him graciously, and he responded by spitting at my feet. When I looked down to check that the gobbet of saliva had missed my shoe, I suddenly realised that I was no longer holding the Luger.

  I scanned the ground, hoping to see it lying half-concealed by dirt, but it was nowhere to be found. There were still many soldiers milling about, so it wasn’t possible to get down on my hands and knees and scrabble about for it. The Luger was gone, and I knew that I’d be held responsible for this, even though the real responsibility was squarely Corporal Glen Pyers’. With any luck, the captain whose weapon it was would be too incapacitated by loose bowels to make enquiries about his Luger until we’d moved on. If my own bowels were tortured by flux, I didn't think I’d be worrying about a purloined German handgun.

  I found my way back to the racecourse and, despite the blanketing darkness there, even managed to locate the paltry rectangle of bare earth that would serve as my bed. None of the men with whom I’d gone into town had yet returned, and I could only suppose that they’d found somewhere to drink themselves into a stupor. That suited me well. The drunker they were, the less likely they were to ask questions about the wretched Luger.

  I wasn’t yet ready to retrieve my duffel bag from the bus and attempt to make a rudimentary bed from spare clothes. I headed to the area where the stage had been raised, and found that there were people making adjustments to the rigging, and there were even a few musicians practising their parts. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do to help, and I felt a sudden reluctance to offer assistance. Any promise of camaraderie that might have resulted from attachment to the concert party had failed to eventuate. This wasn’t really my fault, although I knew I lacked Brian’s common touch. I’ve never been comfortable disappearing into the herd, and this is the principle upon which camaraderie turns. Pulling together, and running with the pack, are distinctions without difference. I withdrew and returned to my quarters, as it were.

  Sleep was impossible. The ground was hard, despite layers of dust so thick that they ought to have provided a cushion. My body was tender in key areas after the riot, and passing soldiers stumbled into me, and over me, and kicked up dust that stifled me and made breathing a torture. I must have fallen into a light doze, though, because I was wakened from it by Brian’s and Glen’s drunken arrival. They’d had, it transpired, a wild and rollicking evening with the very soldiers who’d knocked me to th
e ground and booted me from pillar to post. Apparently, they were tremendously good fellows who were quite reasonably agitated by the discharging of my Luger. There was no point arguing with them. Their systems were too flooded with alcohol to allow them to see sense. I held fire, even when Glen said, ‘That was a dickhead thing to do, Will. Someone could’ve been killed.’

  I couldn’t put this level of stupidity entirely down to booze, so I had to suppose that his extraordinary sleight-of-hand skills were nature’s way of compensating him for low intelligence.

  ‘Go to bed,’ I said. ‘I probably saved your life so, yes, I suppose that does make me a dickhead.’

  Glen laughed derisively and dangled the missing Luger close to my face. When he spoke, his voice assumed a sharp, rather nasty, edge.

  ‘You dropped this. Just add me to the list of people who’ve spent their lives picking up after you.’

  He let the Luger slip from his fingers, and the barrel caught me painfully just above the right eye. I immediately felt the warm ooze of blood, but I didn’t make a fuss. Brian and Glen, who’d fetched their duffel bags before they found me, set about clumsily laying out the groundsheets. This proved quite difficult, given their lack of coordination and the darkness. I felt disinclined to help them, and took some satisfaction in the sure knowledge that their next day’s brutal hangovers, allied with the heat, dust, and flies, would be unspeakably unpleasant.

  I stayed out of everyone’s way throughout almost all of the following day. I wandered about swatting flies and then regretted eating lunch, which was filthy, after finding the cookhouse and looking inside. The English language lacks a descriptor that would do it justice. ‘Squalid’ is altogether too grand.

  By late afternoon my nerves had been stripped raw after hours of attempting to keep Beelzebub’s minions away from the small wound Glen had opened. The thought of one of those creatures settling above my eye after traipsing over someone’s stool in the cesspit was almost too much to bear. I’m not by nature squeamish, but I had no desire to repeat Emily Dickinson’s transcendent banality of hearing a fly buzz when I died. I found solace in preparing for that night’s performance. As soon as I fell into the rhythm of dressing and making up, and going over my lines, my dejection eased. I couldn’t, of course, lose myself in a character, but I had a responsibility to deliver the best performance possible — in spite of, not because of, the material.

  That night’s audience, a mix of Australian and American soldiers, greeted Camp Happy with a response that verged on the ecstatic. They whistled, howled, laughed, and applauded in a kind of frenzy of gratitude. When Brian crossed the stage I thought the roar would tear a hole in heaven.

  There was, though, an ugly incident after the show involving Brian and a completely sober G.I. I witnessed it, and was amongst those who intervened to prevent what threatened to be something akin to rape. A tall, pallid, red-headed private, with an accent that an American Professor Higgins might have been able to pinpoint to a grim cabin in a remote corner of Mississippi, waylaid Brian as he came off stage. Unless Brian excited in him an uncontrollable need to express a transvestite passion, he genuinely believed that he’d found the girl of his tortured dreams amid the choking grit of Mt Isa. Brian attempted to repel his advances in his masculine, light baritone, and one can only surmise that the boy’s mother had an unnaturally deep voice, because he was unfazed by the sonorous dichotomy between form and sound, and pressed his case rather too insistently.

  It was at this point that Brian’s ability to balance in high heels was revealed as being confined to the predictability of floorboards. The uneven dirt that lay between the stage and the costume truck caused him to totter inelegantly when he shoved his admirer forcefully in the chest. Brian fell, and instead of bringing out the gentleman in this southerner, the spectacle of the now prone and flailing Brian caused him to pounce with the blind determination of an animal on heat. It all happened more quickly than the time it takes to describe it —a fact that Brian later chose to ignore when he accused me of allowing the assault to progress beyond the point where it was either humorous or safe. As I wasn’t the only witness, I, in my turn, pointed out that events unfolded too rapidly to allow anyone to grasp the gravity of the situation. As soon as Brian hit the dirt there were several pairs of hands, including mine, dragging his over-enthusiastic beau off him.

  ‘Pairs of hands,’ I said, ‘that I could have done with last night. Where were you when I was being stomped on?’

  ‘I didn’t see that. After you fired that shot it was chaotic.’

  ‘Sure. We’re supposed to watch out for each other, Brian. Maybe you should try to remember that.’

  If he’d still been in wig and make-up, I’d have described his response as unmistakably a pout. It wasn’t, as I told him, an attractive addition to his repertoire of emotions, and we both went to bed — a ludicrous expression for what was in essence lying down in the dirt — in a state of simmering mutual discontent.

  Chapter Four

  darwin

  THE EVENTS OF THE FOLLOWING DAY dispelled the ill-feeling between my brother and me. I awoke, peeled the flies from around my mouth — God knows how long they’d been ensconced there, vomiting and reingesting their foul efflux — and attempted, like everyone else, to shave and get clean. It struck me as absurd that the army expected its soldiers to be clean-shaven, and then placed them in situations where this simple daily routine became torturous, time-consuming, and disfiguring.

  We learned, after a breakfast of something that may have been porridge, but which may equally have been warmed gravel, that our bus wasn’t sufficiently robust to survive the journey from Mt Isa to Camooweal, and thence to Katherine. Instead we were to be crowded into the back of American transport trucks. I was alarmed to find our black driver, and the other drivers in the convoy, all of them black, donning respirators before climbing into the cabin. We’d barely pulled away from the racecourse when the need for the respirator became apparent. The convoy moved in great, boiling clouds of red dust.

  There was no protection for us in the open tray of the truck; yet, when I settled on the uncomfortable bench that provided the only seating, I thought the trip might be just tolerable. I changed my mind when the convoy moved away from Mt Isa and gathered speed. Conversation became impossible and, distressingly, so did sitting down. The road declined into an endless run of bone-jarring, teeth-shattering corrugations which the drivers attempted to cheat by pushing their trucks to terrifying speeds. To sit was to bounce; to stand was also to bounce. But bouncing on the balls of one’s feet is considerably less painful than bouncing on one’s buttocks. This was a nugget of knowledge I could have done without.

  An hour into our journey — and given that it was to be a journey of more than a thousand miles, an hour represented a trivial portion of it — I began to think I didn’t have the stamina to endure it. I was exhausted and parched, and every jolt aggravated with exquisite and agonising repetition the bruising I’d suffered at the feet of our so-called Allies.

  In the first of many paradoxes I would come to associate with life north of Capricorn, my bladder was urging me to expel precious fluid while my throat was screaming for water. The latter I could accommodate, with difficulty, and at great risk to my teeth, by taking juddery swigs from my water bottle. The former was more complicated. The trucks stopped for no one and for nothing, and that included the dysentery-afflicted captain whose Luger I’d borrowed. In an awkward and dangerous manoeuvre he squatted with his arse out over the tailboard of the truck. All bodily evacuations for all of us were managed over the rear edge. It was only desperation that made it physically possible. It was essentially passing water and jumping up and down at the same time — a combination of movements not generally practised, but which might have some application in an obscure branch of vaudeville. The driver of the truck behind was spared the worst of the spectacle by the impenetrable clouds of
dust thrown up by the vehicle in front.

  The convoy stopped briefly for lunch, which was a tin of peaches, and to refuel. All the tension between Brian and me had been juddered out of us, and we speculated, along with Glen, about what awaited us in Katherine. None of us had travelled overland this far north or west before; to our eyes, the landscape was brutal.

  ‘It’s not all going to be like this,’ Brian said, assuming his irritating, teacher’s voice. ‘It’s the wet tropics where we’re going to end up, not this arid stuff.’

  I was reassured, and began to entertain visions of cool gullies and dark rainforests, where dust never blew and where crystalline streams flowed over picturesque moss and lichen. The four days it took to reach Larrimah, from where we caught a troop train to Katherine, remain a blurred progression through desert, spinifex, termite mounds, sudden expanses of grassland interrupted by the startlingly white trunks of lone ghost gums, great stretches of thin scrub, and always, always the obliterating miasma of dust, dust, dust. Camooweal, Banka Banka, Elliott, Daly Waters — these are places we passed through, but the character of which I can’t attest to. The overriding impression was one of persistent grimness, although this may be symptomatic of my usual optimism having been shaken loose and jostled into the disarray of despair. I do recall that the shared hideousness of the journey created an unexpected intimacy amongst my fellow travellers, and particularly between Brian, Glen, and me.

  The makeshift camps at the end of each appalling day enabled us to talk; and, despite being harried and horrified by rats, scorpions, centipedes, ants, and an entomological encyclopaedia’s worth of flying insects, our talk was easy and warm. By the time we’d reached the railhead at Larrimah on Saturday, 24 October 1942 I was confident that, whatever befell us, I’d be glad of Brian’s and Glen’s company. In a completely unexpected rush of fraternal emotion, I even began to look forward to meeting my youngest brother, Fulton, who was still, as a result of the years that separated us, a child to me. Given that he was now an admired member of a secret army unit, I had to concede that perhaps he’d left his childhood behind. I began to wonder whether I’d even recognise him. His face was indelibly etched in my mind as the face of a boyish eighteen-year-old, which was probably the last time I’d looked at him closely. I don’t think he’d even used a razor then. It seemed extraordinary that, at twenty-one, he was now unequivocally a man.